Innocent when you dream

Through the eyes of the country's children, Billy Leahy learns that art is not all about rules, concepts, abstractions and justifications

In the middle of last year, the Irish Museum of Modern Art played host to an exhibition of the mid-20th Century art group CoBrA. Taking its name – and annoying mid-word capital letters – from the cities it was based in (Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam), CoBrA attempted to reject the art trends of its time and to locate itself somewhere between primitive art, children's drawings and mythology.

This they hoped would create a new type of art and a new anti-elitist society, based on a language everyone could understand, in which everybody would not only have the right to creative expression but a definite opportunity of its realisation.

The group's output varied in quality and importance and it disbanded after just three years, leaving behind a continuing debate over its importance.

Viewed by some as the last great avant-garde movement of the 20th Century, CoBrA was also much maligned for being derivative and clichéd. Now it lies in chronological order in the annals of art history, to be criticised and reviewed along with the trends and movements it attempted to shirk away from. One of the most important elements and influences for CoBrA's output, however, was the work of children, as it was seen as still untainted with the rules and conventions of contemporary society.

The current touring exhibition from the National Gallery of Ireland, Learning from Art – which comprises 39 works by young Irish people from around the country and inspired by the gallery collection – succeeds in a manner CoBrA never could have. Is has the unadulterated purity that CoBrA admired, but could ultimately only produce in a knowing and preconceived fashion.

What it also does is interprets and translates the collection in a fresh light and new manner entirely removed from the world of the art critic and reviewer, which is filled with reference points and a catalogue of influences. In other words, it makes me redundant – but a very interested viewer.

The children are attracted to interpret specific works, not in an attempt to understand the meaning behind a Louis le Brocquy or a Pieter Brueghel, but because there is a basic element that delights or interests them in the original image.

The Learning from Art project, which dates back to 1999, has as its main point to encourage young people to be curious and creative, while using the national collection as a source of inspiration. Their perception of the works is transferred into their own original drawings and paintings, allowing them to gain hands-on visual art education as well as an outlet for their creativity. Some works are interpreted in an accurate manner, remaining true to the original, while others free themselves from the real work in an uninhibited and creative fashion.

Having already shown in Dublin, the exhibition will now go on tour in the New Year to eight venues around Ireland as part of the National Gallery's sesquicentenary celebrations. The young exhibitors have already benefited from Learning from Art, but there is also much to be learnt and garnered from the project for adults as well as children. Just ask CoBrA.

More Learning from Art tour programme 2004/2005

Clare - Glór Irish Music Centre, December 2004

Wexford - Wexford Education Centre January/February 2005

Offaly - Áras an Chonae, Tullamore, March 2005

For more dates and venues (March-December 2005), see www.nationalgallery.ie