Translator: Ivana Krivokuća Reviewer: Ivana Korom
Picasso once said it took him four years to learn to paint like Raphael,
but a lifetime to draw like a child.
I like to think that Picasso was saying that we can all learn disciplines,
and mechanical ideas.
But wouldn't it be great to go back to that innate awesome place
that we all have when we're children?
Where we don't do the good or bad,
and we observe the world around us and we express it.
I believe that we're all born with two innate languages.
One is sound, and the other is movement.
So when we come out, most of us make noise,
and most of us move our bodies.
And very quickly, we get languages from them.
A little example is when my daughter was a baby,
before she could talk words,
and she was going to the toilet, and she was struggling,
she would do two things: she would grunt
and we'd know that she was having some pain, some difficulty,
and her body would screw up and her face would go bright red.
So we knew that she was expressing to us for two different languages.
Now, sound becomes our verbal language.
And we get taught this through repetition.
So from the moment a child is born, we bombard them with words.
And as a father with an ego, I fell privy to that too,
where I did, "Dada, dada, dada, dada, dada",
and I turned myself into a singular word,
so that hopefully she would say it, and we would understand who I was.
And I've often thought, if we didn't bombard children with words,
at that early stage, I wonder what their vocabulary would actually be,
and would they make the sounds of the different leaves in different trees
as the wind blows through
or all the different sounds that they hear around them.
But what really fascinates me is pictorial language,
the languages built around movement.
Like the scrunching up and going red in the face.
Somewhere around four to eight months,
our fine motor skills start to kick in and our eye-hand coordination.
So if you put a pen or a crayon in a child's hand,
just like the early mouses, we go like this,
back and forth or up and down.
And again, I remember watching my daughter in the studio do her first circle.
I was trying to get her into the bathtub,
and there she was on the wall, drawing this circle.
And the concentration and the involvement
that she had in that circle was amazing.
Something I'd taken for granted as an adult.
What I've realized there was, it was a great leap in her cognitive action.
But for me, more so, was a great leap in her observational skills,
to be able to observe and then communicate with me.
So from that moment on -
and I would hope to guess that every one of us here
did this for the first five years of our lives -
we all start to draw.
So from the moment that observational
cognitive mechanical system kicks in,
we start to draw the world around us and the world within us.
What I love about the pictorial language
is very rarely does anybody gets taught at.
So that sound language is through repetition that we get taught.
We put these finite words onto things,
but the pictorial language, we all do it.
All of us.
And then, somewhere along the line,
most of us turn around and go, "I can't draw".
"I can't draw at all".
Yet, we all did it.
That leads me onto an idea that possibly as adults we see in the two-dimension.
And this might have happened somewhere around the time of the printing press,
when we got bombarded by newspapers and then magazines,
and then advertising posters, and then television,
and now, mobile devices.
All of the things that show us the three-dimensional world around us,
but in 2D.
In the art world, we like to call it "still life",
or as the modernists, we like to call it "photographic realism".
But I don't know anybody, I've never met anybody
who looks like an anatomical drawing.
Anatomical drawings are great maps for doctors.
But even as I speak now and every one of you sit there,
every time I smile, part of my face changes,
my eyes might go up, this floppy ear might stick out.
There's a whole range of actions and movement that are happening.
And that's what we all are, and that's what everything in this world is,
is this continual line of flow, of movement.
So the idea of a still life for me is a great abstraction.
But I do believe that children still see in that movement, in that 3D.
And a great example of it is, if you look at a lot of children's drawings -
and I've been really privileged to have traveled around the world
and worked with children -
and all children, no matter if they've got a pen and paper or a stick and dirt,
seem to draw stick figures.
Sometimes you get to see them and they've drawn a hand
and they've got the circle.
And then they've got all these sticks.
Sometimes it's three sticks, sometimes it's seven, ten, twelve.
And if we all grab our hands now, and you wave them in front of your faces,
how many sticks do you see?
Lots and lots of sticks.
And from the moment a child is born, we do another great thing,
not just go, "dada, dada, dada", we wave at them.
And we eat with our hands, and we do things with our hands,
and we're constantly in movement with our hands.
So children see this great action, this great movement, this great 3D world,
until we come along and somewhere along the line go,
"Well, this is actually a hand, these sticks are called fingers,
and then there's one, two, three, four, five".
We reduce it all down, down to a still life.
And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that,
but it's just an interesting idea
about how we stagnate ourselves
from something which I believe is truly our innate language,
which is this pictorial, this movement language.
So that takes me on to another idea which -
none of these ideas are right or wrong,
they're just kind of my meanderings
of a 32-year career in the creative arts -
but I like to think that possibly the stick figure
is human's most amazing communication tool ever.
And the reasons for me,
apart from the belief that it's innate in all of us and that we all do it,
is if we look at the oldest language that we know,
we go to rock and cave art.
And those rock and cave arts are stick figures, pretty well.
But as a society, we have embellished
so much creative emotions
and creative thought upon them.
We've studied them, we've spent so much energy on these stick figures,
that we don't know who did them, really what they mean.
I like to think that possibly,
they were the children's drawings in the cave while the adults were going,
"Stop doing that on the wall!"
Beautiful thing, when you look at those drawings is
most of them are in movement.
So when we see the horses or the buffaloes and even the kangaroos and snakes,
they're in movement.
So I believe that early humans saw in that 3D world
that everything was in movements and flow.
That takes me back to the Picasso quote.
If Picasso was trying to find
that quick initial representation through line,
that gave you an emotional response and an intellectual response,
and also an output response, in the sense that you understood what it is.
Then we look at children's drawings, like we look at the cave art,
and we go, "Yeah, we all understand it. It's really simple".
And then if we take a lot of the early text-based languages,
most of the Asian text-based languages,
the hieroglyphics of the Aztecs and the Egyptians,
again we see the stick figure.
And what I love about those stick figures also is some of them, yes, are letters,
and some are words.
But some are emotions.
So what we'd call probably a sentence now.
And then if we take the idea that every single person -
or mostly every single person -
that the pictorial language based around movement
or observation is innate in us,
then I believe the stick figure could open us up
to an amazing understanding and an amazing world.
The thing I would love to see is I'd love to see us celebrate -
like we do with all the effort through universities
and through National Geographic,
on cave and rock art and the early text-based pictorial languages -
and do the same for children's drawings.
I'd love to see a world where we put children's drawings
all the way through our houses,
all the way through our schools, our businesses, our community,
so that we could actually really see them
for what they are.
And I have a belief, which - I don't know if it's right or wrong,
and I don't think it is probably right, but I do like to think of it -
that we are all creative and every single thing we do
is basically creative.
The word "art" is a scary word that kind of dictated us
as out of being creative, or the belief that we're creative.
And I believe that creative -
everything that creative comes from initially,
are creative emotion
that's influenced by something around us.
So even this talk here,
it's not really just me talking here because you are talking,
making up your story,
and that story is actually what fuels everything.
That's the creative,
passion that we all have,
and that creative passion then goes to the creative mind,
and the creative mind puts it all together in jigsaw puzzles together,
and you all do that individually.
And then hopefully, we have a creative output.
And like Picasso I think was saying is
he wanted to get back to that raw place
where the creative output is not judged.
When we're kids, in that first five years, we just draw.
We don't go, "Oh no, I've got ten fingers and they only got five".
There's none of that, it's just about what we observe
and how far we take storytelling, which we all have.
So I would love if all of you go home tonight and do one thing,
which is, find one of your children's drawings.
Find a drawing from when you were a child.
Celebrate it. Put it on your wall.
Study it and it will tell you a story, it will tell you a story about you.
But what's so beautiful about it is everybody on this planet,
no matter what language you speak,
will understand that drawing too.
Now you all can draw and you all did draw for the first five years of your life
without you saying, "I can't".
And it's a beautiful language. Thank you very much.
(Applause)