but the child is right

“Jean Drawing” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
“Jean Drawing” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Children will draw pictures with everything in them … houses and trees and people and animals … and the sun AND the moon. Grown-up says, “That’s a nice picture, Honey, but you put the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time and that isn’t right.” But the child is right! The sun and moon are in the sky at the same time.
~ R. Buckminster Fuller
(Buckminster Fuller to Children of Earth)

12 thoughts on “but the child is right”

    1. Thank you, Laurie. It’s funny I never noticed the day moon until I was an adult – I think there were too many trees in the woods blocking my view of the sky.

    1. Your’e welcome, Gitanjali. It’s amazing what the eye misses at times – last night we were learning about “change blindness” on a science program.

  1. That is so true. Children sometimes intuitively understand in ways we grown-up folks have long forgotten… This post reminded me of our son, Chris. He was always drawing, drawing, drawing.

    1. So you have an artist in your family, too, Kathy? My maternal grandmother and my paternal grandfather could draw well. The gene skipped a couple of generations, though. My parents and I were not artistic, but my sister, my aunt and my kids draw very well… It’s so true, children tend to see the big picture!

    1. I think Jean was Renoir’s own son – apparently he had three sons, Claude, Pierre and Jean. I wonder if they became artists, too…

    1. Very true, Sybil – it’s part of what makes eclipses and what they reveal so fascinating to us humans here on earth!

    1. Or, as the elephant Horton, of ‘Horton Hears a Who’ said, “a person’s a person, no matter how small.” Thank you, Diane!

I welcome and appreciate your comments.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.