How did I end up living an Artful life?

I want to start of by telling you a story, a story about my son. It happened some years ago but I remember as if it was yesterday…

The Blue Violinist, Marc Chagall

When he was about 2 years old we got him a painting for his birthday. It was an oil painting reproduction, a copy of an old master called Marc Chagall. On the painting, pictured a man in bright blue colours who was fiddling the violin. A beautiful work, painted in a style that only Chagall could have done.

My son loved it! No matter how small he was, the combination of shapes, colours and style grabbed him. We made the right choice. The painting was put up on a wall in his room.

An expert of Chagall?

About a year later we decided to go to an exposition in Brussels featuring Magritte. Most of you will know this painter because of his black hats and apples as a face. We strolled around and my son was happily walking around looking way up to all these paintings. Then suddenly he stopped and he said something that sounded like Chagall, my husband and I looked at each other and said sorry what did you say?

My son pointed his finger at this painting that was a Chagall but a completely different one – and clearly repeated “Chagall”. Wow…how could that be…it was indeed a Chagall. The couple next to us that was also enjoying in amazement started speaking to us, how incredible, how could a three year old recognise this so easily?

That was the moment I got inspired, my epiphany.

A Prodigy. Need I say more?

His recognizing of a painter to me has been an inspiration to find my way in the art world and the start of living an artful life.

Art and the Unconscious Mind…an introduction

Who’s who? Pre-schoolers (3-5 yrs) know

Pre-schoolers, kids between the age of 3 and 5, have this miraculous ability to recognise things. Its during that age that your brain starts to form the neural connections to adapt to their social environment.

A study was done showing that kids at the age of 4 can in fact learn to recognise chimps! Can you imagine that…to have the ability to keep chimps apart. To us they all look the same and it is incredibly hard, even for zoo caretakers to keep them apart. Kids at that age can even name them and perfectly know which chimp their dealing with. But then as amazing as this skill is acquired, this ability rapidly disappears by the time kids are 5 years old.

In doing so we eventually tune out the ability to recognize other kind of faces. Which explains why people in the western world and vice versa think people from the Oriental look alike…We simply can’t help it. By the time we reach the age of 5 we lose 90% of the neural connections that were build to recognize faces. This proves that it’s a learned ability, and also could explain how the visual part of your brain functions in relationship to styles in art.

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