Someone recently showed me a drawing by a budding artist and asked me: "Do you think it's good?"
When is art "good"? Who decides whether it is "good"? Is it good if it is "sophisticated"? If it "looks real"? When someone savvy thinks it could sell for a lot of money? When it’s "pretty" or "trendy"? I'm not sure.
When we were little kids and we made something or we tried to display our talents, we beamed if the other kids said "Whoa! It's so good!" Think of a group of 6-year olds and the one with the biggest, tallest Lego building: "It's so good!" say the other kids. Or the boy who always gets picked for a team: "He's sooo good!" say the other boys on the playground. Or the girl who often gets picked for an outstanding role in the class play: "She's so good!" say her classmates. Better than the rest.
When little girls come for paint workshops, they often ask me, wide-eyed and holding up their work, "Is it good?" Sometimes they look around at what the other girls are doing. I like to ask them how it makes them feel when they look at it. Does it make them smile? Usually they do. I point out what I see in their work that is beautiful. I hope they can feel joy in the experience itself (and that is truly good).
"But I messed up here," they sometimes protest. "I have to erase it! It's not good. That's not how it's supposed to look."
"Don't worry about how any other painting looks," I try to convince them. "Don't worry about messing up or coloring everything in the lines. Maybe the 'messed up' part is the best part!" Sometimes we stop what we are doing and paint something that is all outside the lines on purpose (see below).
How old are we when we first start to think that something is "good" if it's perfectly inside the lines and it looks how it's supposed to look? ("Supposed to" -- as in, how the other people's stuff looks.) How old are we when we start to look at our things, our families, our achievements, even our faces...and ask whether they are good, compared to someone else's good?
When the girls ask "is it good" and look at the other girls' paintings, I sometimes think back to the days when I looked in a mirror, at my Creator’s work, comparing it to the other girls' reflections and asked myself in my insecure little heart, “It is good?” Sometimes, as a grown-up, I still ask myself whether what I have or what I've accomplished is “good.” Compared to what? Who decides?
Apparently, I can decide: Think good, and it will be good (famously said by the Tzemach Tzedek). It is said that if we want to activate good, we can choose to see good and focus on it...whether it's choosing to focus today on my positive qualities, the positive attributes of another, or even the beautiful brushstrokes in a scribble-scrabble work of art. (It is, of course, conceptually deeper than how I'm typing it here. I thought about a shiur I heard last year--listen here, shiur by Rav Moshe Weinberger, 15 minute mark.) Not saying I practice this regularly; just that I would like to...
So is a new piece of art "good"? One way to answer that question: If you see the good and the beauty in it, then perhaps it is good. Like anything else.
********************************************
These are some of my favorite "outside the lines" paintings. Created with water balloons filled with paint (you can guess what happened next). Can you tell which one was made by a 3-year old and which by an 8-year old? Aren't they good :)
Comments