'Art for the Heart’ classes:
for adults wanting to facilitate art for children

A child can no more be forced to develop than a flower be forced to grow. Children are potent seeds requiring protection and nourishment as nature takes its course: they are not empty vessels waiting to be filled. There are no short cuts in natural development.

One of the things children need protection from is the destruction of their natural flowering by being forced to ripen too soon intellectually, and by too little interaction with the forces of creativity in nature and artistic play.

One of the things that deeply nourishes children is exposure to the basic elements of artistic activity: that is, the colour spectrum and modeling with the hands. What once happened naturally, as a part of simpler, less technological lifestyles and playing close to nature, now needs to be provided by adults.

Children learn holistically through their hands, not through their ‘brains’. ‘Brain-learning’ occurs at great risk to the overall welfare of the child and later adult. Many adult and older-age illnesses can be traced back to intellectual stress in early childhood. An academically ‘successful’ young child is no guarantee of a healthy well-rounded adult.

Non-verbal activities are so pleasurable and nourishing for children, since they live in a world that is pre-verbal or early verbal. Instead of pressuring children to join us in our verbal, intellectual and technological adult world too soon, we can allow them the brief period of life that is a kind of ‘heaven’ adults imagine escaping to (plenty of rest for body and mind, few responsibilities, freedom and play).

Artbeat aims to help children enjoy this natural ‘heaven-on-earth’, for its own sake and the sake of the healthier adult that will emerge from it blessed.

The benefits

• Meets each child where they are at in their unique developmental phase of life, as it relates to the natural development of the three phase of childhood/adolescence, from 0-7, 7-14, and 14-21, instead of imposing premature learning upon them that can damage their natural development and create long term physical, mental and emotional disability.

• Engages children directly in their own response to creativity, which counteracts the damage of more passive forms of ‘education’ that are limited to information recall and entertainment.

• Teaches technically simple activities that are the foundation for more complex concepts and methods: a foundation that, if bypassed, leaves a child vulnerable to intellectual overload, burnout and nervous conditions (learning difficulties, ‘depression’, anxiety, antisocial behaviors, addictions, and even later-life illnesses such as dementia etc).

Many children learn to regurgitate information or mimic tasks without understanding or feeling any connection to the meaning of what they can recall. This retards the necessary development of Emotional Intelligence (EQ), which should parallel and balance any development of Intellectual Intelligence (IQ). If intellectual academic effort is the in-breath then creative play is the out-breath.

• With colour and modeling activities the child’s invisible inner life (organic and psychological-spiritual) is nourished. Instead of waiting until signs of ‘malnourishment’ are revealed in physical, emotional or mental illnesses, we can provide the child with creative ‘food’ suitable for their stage of development.

• By providing opportunities for the parents and carers to learn these simple art methods Artbeat aims to take art activity out of the classroom and into the daily lives of families where healthy learning habits are best modeled.

Children mimic their parents/carers from 0-7 years of age and then model their behaviour on them from 7-14 tears of age, so if parents demonstrate a sincere connection to the creative elements in art and nature it will be more likely that they inspire the same in their children.

• The increase in technology (computer games and tutorials etc) and the decrease in simple physical hand games (marbles, knitting, wood-carving etc) have meant a great loss of natural learning in children. Until the age of 14 children learn about the outer world primarily through their hands and the sense of touch, and the mechanistic movements associated with technology, coupled with the lower-body over-emphasis of games like soccer, are creating fundamental imbalances in children’s still-developing bodies.

In all the sophistication of mass-produced, modern toys there is also a loss of the quiet, relaxed, naturally and effortlessly inventive state of mind that simple activities nurture: quietly drawing purely from the imagination; hunting for sea shells; making a boat out of scraps; making a dolly out of rags.

Artbeat offers another way to play, for children teens and adults

The approach

• Artbeat teaches simple, foundational artistic skills that are profound in their impact: enhancing natural, healthy development, (cognitive and creative), and also addressing developmental problems. No prior skills needed, no ‘talent’ prerequisites.

• With chalk pastel and watercolour paint we use just the three primary colours (yellow, red and blue) to develop a relationship to the infinite palate of colours and shades of the external physical and internal emotional worlds e.g. the blue of the sky and the ‘blues’ that we sometimes feel as part of being human.

• With modeling clay we explore the foundational shapes that make up the material world of form but are also inherent in the inner ‘gestures’ of our emotional lives: contraction/expansion, curved/straight, round/flat

• The art activities work on two main levels

1. To allow children the chance to express in a non-verbal way (appropriate to their age and development) what can otherwise remain ‘stuck’, ‘unsaid’ and unresolved inside.

2. To provide children with the ‘medicine’ of the colours (of drawing and painting) and the holistic hand activities (of clay work).