Canvas for Kids

Artists are creating art specially for kids as young as two months old, and they can’t keep up with the demand.

Artists are creating art specially for kids as young as two months old, and they can’t keep up with the demand.

For 35-year-old Sandra Sousa, theatre was an all-encompassing passion. However, the birth of her daughter changed it all. As she saw the world through her daughter’s eyes, Sandra was compelled to pick up the brush. “I wanted to bring to life the innocence of a child’s views about nature. That’s when I decided to paint animals,” says this petite French artist who has been in India since August 2009. An art teacher with Salaam Baalak Trust, Sandra is one of the many artists who are now specialising in art for kids. What started as a one-off experiment has now transformed into a full-fledged art movement, as professional painters from around the world take up the brush to create vivid acrylics and creative oil paintings just for children. Though the market for these paintings is still in a nascent stage, the challenge of creating something novel is what’s driving artists towards this new genre of art.

Gone are the days of passive monochromatic images of hastily drawn cartoon characters that earlier used to adorn children’s rooms. These have been replaced by bright and animated visuals that kids can relate to. A relaxed-looking cow cycling down the beach, animals chilling on a farm, a frog’s graceful leap, and a snail’s slow trail are just some of the images that stare back at you from the walls. Artists are now finding out that tiny tots aren’t exactly easy to please! More often than not, they prove to be more finicky than adults. Hence, painstaking research goes into finding the right colour and the right movement that would appeal to this exalted clientele. The idea is to no longer create a mere decorative, but to make something educational and inspiring for kids. “A parent can point out the animals in the painting and the kids can associate the respective colours and shapes with them,” says Samira Morarka Khandelwal, who runs Kroma, the only gallery for kids in the country.

The idea to start something like this in Delhi hit her while she and her sister were holidaying in Bali. “We saw some very interesting figures and bought a few for our nephew, who was three months old at the time. Soon, we realised that he was catching on to the colours really fast after looking at the images,” explains Samira. After doing a fair bit of research, the two sisters decided to open Kroma a year-and-a-half ago. With two exhibitions behind them, the duo is extremely happy with the kind of response that the paintings have received. “Even in times of cost cutting, people wish to indulge their children. In fact, such is the popularity of these paintings that we sell around ten of these in a month,” says Samira. However, none of these paintings come cheap, with prices ranging from Rs 4,600 for a regular-sized and going up to Rs 50,000 and a lakh for a wallpaper.

If you happen to visit the gallery, you will notice kids huddled around the alphabet paintings. Created by Bangkok-based artist Monchai Kosolpradit, the series has emerged as the hot favourite among little ones.

A graduate of Bangkok’s prestigious College of Fine Arts, Monchai has been working in this field with his wife Nee for the past several years now. His style has often been described as abstract, inspired by the daily life around him. Monchai’s bright and childlike visuals effortlessly capture the innocence and beauty of the world of animals. He has been sending his paintings to Kroma ever since the gallery opened, and his creations have been flying off the walls.

Nothing excites kids more than vibrant images of animals. They seem to be a favourite subject for most artists as well, as the four-legged creatures allow them to simply let loose their imagination. The idea is that if the artist has fun creating the painting, the kids will have fun viewing it. Take Southeast Asian artists Joe and Ole, for instance. They bring a lot of cheer and joy to the artwork with creative renditions of animated characters.

Sandra, too, has been creating a series of triptychs depicting animals in flashy colours. For the uninitiated: a triptych is a set of three paintings that reveals different parts of a moving animal. This is the artist’s way of depicting movement and leaving the interpretation open to the viewer. The influence of theatre and cinema is evident in Sandra’s work, as frame and subject placement play an integral part in her paintings. “I remember seeing this triptych of a fly once. In the first frame the fly was in the air, in the second the fly was sitting on the edge of the board, and in the final frame there was just the image of the board, as the fly had gone. It was such an interesting way of showing movement,” elaborate Sandra and her filmmaker husband Phillipe.

Children from all age groups—right from eight- to nine-year-olds to even babies who are a few months old—can enjoy these paintings. “Research has proven that even a newborn can discern colours clearly. The longer a child looks at something, the longer the concept stays with him,” explains Samira. In fact, according to a study carried out by Richard L Canfield and Marshall M Haith and published by the American Psychological Association, two-to-three-month and year-old infants have definitive responses to predictable and unpredictable sequences of visual stimuli. Visual sequences help a baby of three months learn and remember stuff for weeks.

More distinctive the images, more unique the children’s responses to them. “A client of ours had two-month-old twin daughters. She bought a cow painting from us; each time that her daughters would look at the painting they would smile. The colours made them happy,” adds Samira. It is no wonder then that the biggest clients for these artists are young mothers, schools and even hospitals. It is for this reason that artists lay a lot of emphasis on the colours they use. Be it acrylic or oil paintings, the background always has to be bright and striking. The concept is just as important as the colours. The visuals in a numbers series would be different from the visuals in the alphabet series. This requires a fair bit of thought and ideational fluency on the part of the artist.

It seems ironic that in India, the children’s art movement seems to be spearheaded by foreign artists, with minimal participation from local painters. “Foreign artists have been practising this art for longer. They have understood the themes that would appeal to the child. We did get some requests from Indian artists to exhibit, but they all wanted to copy existing cartoon images,” says Samira. According to illustrators like Tapas Guha, very little Indian work exists in this field, given its reliance on dark and depressing themes. “This would definitely affect the child’s senses… maybe very subtly, but it does,” says Guha.

International artists, on the other hand, have combined the various facets of Eastern and Western cultures to cater to a global sensibility. They have integrated their expertise in various creative fields to create a series of highly animated paintings that offer the child a glimpse of the fascinating world of nature. Unlike other forms of art that try to intellectualise the harsh realities of life, this unique genre only strives to bring a lot of colour, fun and laughter into kids’ lives. It prefers to open their eyes to the brilliance of the world and give them the power to imagine!

artchildrenKromaSandra Sousa