Through the eyes of a child…

Researchers claim that we are born with 98% of the creative potential of genius, but by the time we reach adulthood, the potential has diminished to a fraction of 1%.   Picasso said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

I remember as a young child filling countless exercise books with hundreds of imaginative drawings.  Some, I still hold in my memory.  Our eight-year-old son Tristan has being doing the same since he was old enough to hold a pencil. 

The drawing reproduced below is one he made when he was five.  It is his vision of the stately domain that he’ll build when he grows up.  If you look closely, you will see the house, the cars, the yacht, the driveway, the garden and the river leading to the sea.  You will also see that he has signed his work!

He has also inherited from his great grandfather, grandfather, and me, the mind of an inventive engineer.  He spent today helping me to reassemble the chiming clock mechanism that I featured a week or so ago.  It was his keen eyesight and steady hand that finally slipped the delicate grass-hopper escapement in place.  Then, with a gentle nudge of the pendulum, the clock made its first tick-tock.  His great grandfather Enoch Burnett, a clock maker by trade, would have been proud of him!