I think of childhood as an explosion of creativity. For most people, growing up and earning a living means leaving all that behind. But an artist never leaves that behind. Edwin Mullhouse was my way of exploring the child as artist and, under the guise of childhood, something larger.
Interpretation
Childhood is a time of creativity that many abandon in adulthood, but artists retain that childlike imagination.
In this quote, Steven Millhauser reflects on the idea that childhood is a period rich with creativity and imagination, a vital part of an artist's identity. He suggests that while many people lose their creative instincts as they grow up and take on adult responsibilities, true artists manage to preserve that childhood essence in their work, allowing them to explore deeper themes and ideas through the lens of their imaginative beginnings.
In practice
During a creative workshop, I shared this quote to inspire participants to tap into their childhood creativity.
That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.
Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.
Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.
It was not the story of design or clothes, it was the fantasy of women that made me want to work in fashion.
It's an honor putting art above politics. Politics can be seductive in terms of things reductive to the soul.
Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.
Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.
There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.
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