I Want to Draw Like Children Again

Children rarely hesitate before drawing.

They do not sit in front of a blank page wondering whether the result will justify the beginning. They start because something appears: an animal, a house, a strange person with impossible proportions, a story already moving faster than the hand can follow.

There is often no visible distance between impulse and mark.

Watching my daughter draw, I am reminded of how little negotiation exists in that gesture. A line becomes a mountain, then a bird, then suddenly a road. Colours do not need explanation. Scale is irrelevant. A purple sun can exist without irony.

What strikes me most is not innocence, but certainty — not the certainty that the drawing will be good, but that it deserves to exist anyway.

Somewhere along the way, many adults lose that. Not the ability to draw, necessarily, but the permission to do it without anticipation of judgment. A blank page becomes crowded before anything is made: by references, by habits, by taste, by the internalized gaze of others, by the quiet pressure to produce something coherent, something worthy, something that resembles what we imagine we are capable of. Even when no one is watching, many of us draw as if someone were already evaluating.

There are times when people describe my drawings as childlike, and I know they do not always mean it kindly. Yet that word does not wound me. Because what they call childlike often contains exactly what I search for: immediacy, softness, disproportion, and a refusal to let every line become overly explained. Not childishness, but a certain freedom — a way of drawing that has not entirely surrendered to correction. And perhaps that is what I miss most: not drawing like a child in style, but drawing like a child in relation to uncertainty.

Children do not seem concerned with consistency. They are not loyal to a visual language. Every drawing can invent its own logic.A face may have one eye larger than the other, arms may emerge from impossible places, and yet nothing feels wrong because nothing is trying to obey an external standard. As adults, we often become faithful to expectations before we even notice them.

I sometimes feel that I begin with too much awareness: of composition, of balance, of what works, of what belongs to my aesthetic, of what might later be shown. That awareness is useful, but it also narrows something. It can make drawing feel less like discovery and more like execution.

What I long for is not technical naivety, because that cannot be recovered. It is something subtler: the willingness to let a drawing remain unresolved, awkward, playful, unnecessary.

To follow an image before understanding it. To allow disproportion without correcting it immediately. To stop deciding too early what a drawing should become. Perhaps maturity in art is not moving further away from that freedom, but learning how to return to it consciously. Not by forgetting what we know, but by loosening our grip on it.

Maybe drawing like a child again means allowing surprise to arrive before control does.

Love, Micol