Over the long weekend, my daughter and I finally finished the soapstone carving project that we started almost a year ago. We bought a kit that contained a block of stone cut out in a rough shape of an orca. It looked exactly as if it was done with a cookie-cutter. In fact, it was made by hand using a scroll saw. We talked to the sculptor, who made these kits. He said that it took he quite a bit of trial and error to find the right dimensions of the cutout. But once it was done, it was matter of rounding the edges and smoothing the surface to produce a rather neat carved figure of an orca. The success was practically guaranteed, and a 6-7 year-old kid could produce a carving in a matter of hours.
In our defence, the reason it took us so long was that we had to leave the figure unfinished while we went to Europe for most of the year. All that was left to be done was to wax and buff the surface. We used a hair dryer to heat the stone orca (it became so hot that I had to hold it with a towel!) and rubbed it with a piece of wax, which was also in the kit. When the stone cooled down, we buffed the surface with a piece of cloth.
I wonder if it is the key to a successful and enjoyable creative project for beginners in any field: having the most time-consuming part pre-completed (e.g. providing a pre-cut rough shape of a statue with correct proportions), while leaving some room for creativity in terms of small details and finishing touches.
This principle worked in a similar way, when my wife and daughter baked chocolate muffins to celebrate our daughter’s birthday at school. Both enjoyed the baking, largely because they used a store-bought mix for the dough.
Probably, this idea of having the hard work done is behind the enduring popularity of colouring books. After all, the outline is already there, with the proportions and the composition taken care of. All that is left is to have fun colouring the details.
University students sometimes complain that the projects they are doing in the labs are “cookie-cutter experiments”, meaning that the outcomes are predetermined, and there is no element of scientific discovery in their work. Perhaps, the instructors, who design the projects, need to find a balance between guiding the students by having some of the preliminary work done beforehand, but allowing enough uncertainty in the remaining process to enable sometimes-surprising results.
Then again, at some point someone would have to learn how to do the entire project from scratch, starting from the metaphorical rough piece of stone and finishing with a polished sculpture. There is a great pleasure in creating your own paintings instead of colouring within the lines all the time.
There is a saying: “New is well-forgotten old”. These days, as we are unpacking after returning from 
My daughter and I decided to make a new picture book based on the pretend-play that she does every day in the car on her way to school. 
I was watching “
” and “
” are some of my daughter’s (and my) favourite movies. Sometimes, it seems that the details are all there is in these films – there is no clear overarching “moral of the story”. In “Totoro” in particular, it seems like nothing is happening in the plot. We are just looking over the shoulder of a family that is living its everyday life. But of course, this very everyday life of the two girls and their parents is full of magic. It’s just that the adults are not seeing it. So in these movies too, the magic is in the details that are right before our eyes.
My wife and I are getting exposed to some 
. I should mention that my wife is not a fan of Warhol, to put in gently, and at some point we used to have heated discussions about whether the world had collectively gone mad in regarding him as a great artist (of course, recent developments in American politics have re-defined the notion of collective delusion and put arguments about art into perspective). Then, our daughter had another series of lessons based on the art of 
and 
. To be fair, the curriculum at 4Cats was balanced in that it also had a session on 
, 
and 
.
. In her school back in Canada, they used to paint ‘Kandinsky’s circles’ in the art class, so she was delighted to see a reproduction of the ‘Squares with Concentric Circles’ on the wall in our rental apartment here in Milan. When we saw an advertisement that a Kandinsky’s exhibit was coming up at Museo delle Culture, she was really looking forward to it.
”, where Tommy Lee Jone’s character, Travis Lehman, asks, pointing at a Kandinsky’s painting: “Those are nice pictures there. Did your kids do them?” When I look at my daughter’s drawings inspired by it, I can see why this is a cliche. The apparent similarity is a perfect illustration of the process of deliberate simplification that great artists like Kandinsky or Picasso go through. They converged on “child-like’ expressions not because they lack technical prowess, but because they eliminated all unnecessary elements in their art. In the case of a child, the process is very different, even if the results appears similar. She lacks the ability to include everything that she would like in her drawings and therefore settles only on the essentials. In other words, a five-year-old is limited by her technique, while the masters have come full circle to transcend the technique.