After having spent five years in schools, busy with a scientific study of how children are affected by orthodox educational methods, and after the official results of that study had been published, I then found myself free to investigate certain private misgivings. They were misgivings which had begun to emerge during the course of the scientific work but which had not been clear enough or objective enough to have been put forward in a scientific report. They were concerned with the basic principles underlying the educational method, particularly in the sphere of what is usually called ‘moral’ education and also in sex education or the lack of it; they centred round a feeling that I needed a new set of ideas in thinking about these controversial questions. Although I felt there was a good likelihood that such matters were all connected with the problem of psychic creativity, whatever that might mean, I had not known at all how to take the first steps for studying them or even how to frame the pertinent questions. It was only gradually that a persisting idea had emerged that somehow the problem might be approached through studying one specific area in which I myself had failed to learn something that I wanted to learn.
Always, ever since early childhood, I had been interested in learning how to paint. But in spite of having acquired some technical facility in representing the appearance of objects my efforts had always tended to peter out in a maze of uncertainties about what a painter is really trying to do. Now the thought became more and more insistent that if only it were possible to find out how to set about learning to paint it should also be possible to find out the basic ideas needed for approaching the general educational problem.
This thought did not emerge out of nothing, it was in fact the result of a most surprising discovery, one of those happenings which seem to occur by inadvertence but which afterwards are recognised as marking a turning point in one’s life. It was the discovery that it was possible at times to produce drawings or sketches in an entirely different way from any that I had been taught, a way of letting hand and eye do exactly what pleased them without any conscious working to a preconceived intention. This discovery had at first been so disconcerting that I had tried to forget all about it; for it seemed to threaten, not only all familiar beliefs about will-power and conscious effort, but also, as I suppose all irruptions from the unconscious mind do, it threatened one’s sense of oneself as a more or less known entity. But gradually I had had to force myself to face it, for it was clear that such a fact must undoubtedly have some bearing on those very educational assumptions which had aroused my misgivings. For instance, it might demand a revision of one’s beliefs about the exact role of moral teaching, in so far as such teaching demands willed effort to live up to preconceived standards.
Not only did the way the drawings were produced seem to have a bearing upon the general educational problem but also their content. I did not at first see this, for although the actual technique of the drawings was often better than anything I had managed by deliberate effort, their subjects were usually phantastic, they were more concerned, I had thought, with psycho-analysis than with either painting or school methods. Bit by bit however it became clear that they were not only clues to unconscious ‘complexes’, they were a form of visual reflection on the basic problems of living – and of education; and being so, they were intimately connected, both in their content and their method, with the problems of creativity and creative process.
In the school study one of the problems raised had been to do with what line the staff should take in order to help the quiet over-intraverted child who seems to have insufficient contact with the external world. It was through study of the experience of the free drawings that I came to understand more about the kind of problem that the over-intraverted child is struggling with; and also, incidentally, what the over-extraverted child is running away from. Also in the school study, since the needs of large numbers of children had to be considered, it had seemed best to concentrate on the variety of ways in which different types of children seek to solve their difficulties. Thus certain aspects of the basic nature of everyone’s problem in coming to terms with their surroundings had had to be taken for granted; there had been no time to enquire, for instance, into the processes by which any one of us comes to recognise the significant reality of our surroundings at all. But through the study of difficulties in painting I was to find that this question could no longer be ignored and that it was in fact closely bound up with a misgiving about something being left out of account in the general school system.
Although this issue was at first only dimly guessed at it did seem likely that my enquiry into painting would lead to certain philosophical issues upon which many books had been written. But I decided to make no systematic attempt to read about these. This did not mean making no use of any philosophical writings that I had chanced upon, if they appeared relevant, it only meant not making any deliberate excursions into this field. This was because I vaguely suspected that whatever it might be that the misgivings were beckoning me on to investigate, it was not something that could be apprehended in the first instance by an intellectual approach. For this reason also it seemed best to try to record the stages of the investigation in as simple and direct a way as possible and not to venture beyond personal experience.
I also tried to avoid all books on aesthetic theory and the psychology of art and to confine my reading as far as possible to practical handbooks on the particular field of activity that I had chosen to investigate: that is, to handbooks on how to paint, written by painters.
The drawings were made variously in chalk, charcoal, water-colour, pen and ink, pencil. Since the aim of the book is to describe a personal experience centring round the drawings, not to put them forward as evidence in a scientific treatise, and since the book could not serve its purpose in the educational field if available only to the few, exactness of reproduction of the drawings has had to be sacrificed to ease of reproduction. For this reason there is only one coloured plate (frontispiece), although most of the originals were coloured, and some of the chalk or charcoal drawings have had to be turned into line drawings, by exact tracing. A description of the originals, giving medium, colours and size, is given at the end of the book.
M. M.
London, 1950