“It has taken me a lifetime to learn to paint like a child,” said Pablo Picasso. His creative muse, impulsive and reflective, childlike and, at times, shocking, worked to change everything in the art world.

Today a mode of creativity is found on the computer, also spontaneous and instant and then quickly deleted! Here this morning, gone in a clicking flash. Colors beyond imagination, lifting, scanning, apple-c, apple-x, apple-v, delete, control, option, silhouette, enlarge, pixilate, more without ever touching pen or pencil, brush, paint, or anything. Like a child we can imagine freely and direct the mouse and arrow to create images never seen before on a flat upright crystal screen–save, save as.

We were part of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, just outside Philadelphia, in the summer of 1983, selling musical instruments, making music, meeting people who we would never see again, but who had similar visions as ours. A bright colorful peaceful world.

Down in the valley, the hollow of the festival site, was the children’s area. Long tables had been covered with papers and paints for the kids of festival participants. There was not much direction, just the somewhat guided opportunity for kids to spontaneously color and paint, just for fun. No real objectives with seemingly unlimited time to explore; maybe make a mess, but that is one way of learning. No evaluation, take your drawing, painting, whatever and pin it up on the wall where everyone passing by can see. Keep it? If you wanted to.

There was guidance, of course. Who would dare think to have a few hundred children running wild with crayons and paint brushes in their hands throughout the festival camping site and into the staging area coloring things? No, the children’s area was often remarkably quiet, even intense. Concentrating, choosing, deciding, experimenting, evaluating colors, shapes, and textures. They were tomorrow’s artists.
Flash then to a teaching career with all the regimentation and scheduling of public high school. We all know what that is/was like. Sometimes I still hear the bells ring and watch the halls fill up for a few minutes as students pass from room to room, subject to subject.

Some of the best sessions I ever had as a career teacher were the ones that were spontaneous when something happened. Students were all focused, someone made a profound comment, an image settled in everyone’s minds; humorous was best, all of us laughing together or all of us sedate and crying together. Romeo kills himself? Right there? And then Juliet kills herself? How could that be? The girls in the back of my class were trying not to show their tears.

It happens. They are tools. We are tools. We use tools. That we use tools sets us apart from all other species–we hope!

The computers of today are just tools. Fabulous and filled with what seem to be miracles, but just implements to guide our imaginations. Shakespeare would have used it if he had had one. Can you imagine the results? Picasso? I don’t know. He might have been more curmudgeonly. I use it, you use it, millions and millions of others use computers. I am hoping we do not lose the childlike spontaneity and that poetic composition that helps us see as children.

Oops, open apple-q!!!