GEOGRAPHY IS DISCOVERY: EXPLORING THE WORLD THROUGH CHILDREN’S ART
This last ability is especially evident in “Geography Is Discovery,” a traveling exhibit of works selected by a jury from over 10,000 entries, cosponsored by the National Geographic Society and Paintbrush Diplomacy, a San Francisco organization hoping to foster “international communication through the language of children’s art and writing.” Most of the kids represented here were between 11 and 17, but a few were as young as 6. They were asked to submit art illustrating one of several themes–the environment, the culture, and so on–described in blandly positive terms, which may account for the works’ generally optimistic tone.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Pandas, by six-year-old Gaolin (China), is a child’s version of a traditional Chinese painting. Its simplified brush strokes have a gentle, playful rhythm, whose charm makes both picture making and calligraphy seem almost magical games. Two seated pandas–one of them touching a bamboo plant, the other holding a panda baby–are rendered in strokes of varying thickness and density. The calligraphy across the top is rendered similarly: in the manner of traditional Chinese painting, the text reads “Panda family painted by six-year-old Gaolin in 1991 in Tientsin.” The idea that calligraphy and pictorial images are connected is basic to Chinese art; here the two elements express that nature and language, animal and human names, are not alien to each other. This painting has a feeling of natural, organic balance–neither the words nor the images, the animals depicted nor the painter identified in the text, are superior or inferior to the others. All exist on a continuum that includes humans and animals, images and words.
