Childlike Creativity and the Eastern Brush: What Picasso and Matisse Say about Art

Speaking about Picasso, people would like to mention his paintings like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Guernica, or The Weeping Woman. Hardly anyone would connect the Cubist master with Chinese ink painting. But in fact, Picasso held Eastern art—especially Chinese brushwork and calligraphy—in very high regard. There’s even a story that he once said, “If I had been born in China, I might have become a calligrapher instead of a painter.”

Pablo Picasso and traditional Chinese painter Zhang Daqian (right) at Villa La Californie in Cannes, France in 1956. [Photo/artron.net] The two artists, each a giant in his own right, had a lively exchange.

Picasso wasn’t the only Western artist of his time fascinated by calligraphy. Henri Matisse, too, was something of a calligraphy enthusiast. In his studio in Nice, he famously hung a horizontal plaque that read “清廉南川,” and you can see calligraphic touches in the free-flowing lines of his still-life works.

Why would a traditional Eastern art form like Chinese calligraphy captivate these modern Western artists?

The ancient Chinese scholar Cai Yong of the Eastern Han Dynasty once said in his “Treatise on Calligraphy”: “Calligraphy is about ease and openness. Before you pick up the brush, you must let go of everything that constrains you. If you’re weighed down by worries, even a rabbit-hair brush from Mount Zhong can’t produce a masterpiece.”

True calligraphy requires a free spirit. The artist gather his energy into the tip of the brush, exhale and inhale in harmony, and let his strokes flow. In such a relaxed state, his mind can slip into the present moment—completely absorbed in the line of ink forming on the page.

Interestingly, Picasso was also a champion of “natural expression.” He once described Cubism by saying, “We are realists, but in a different sense. As the Chinese say: ‘I do not imitate nature, I work like nature.’” Art was an expression; the medium—whether ink or paint—and the form—whether lines or shapes—were just tools. When the spirit behind the art is pure, borders and labels dissolve.

Picasso is also known for another famous line:

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” -Picasso

If you pay attention to how child draw and you’ll see there’s nothing they can’t or won’t try to capture. Dogs, bicycles, a loaf of bread—they sketch it all in a flash. Their drawings may look naive, but they sparkle with the details of childhood wonder. Adults, with better hand-eye coordination and broader knowledge, can struggle to put anything down on paper. And even if they do, it can end up as a stiff little symbol, lacking the spark of life.

Why is it that, with all our experience, it’s become harder for us to draw? Because the more concepts we have and the more analysis we do, the weaker our immediate, sensory connection to the world becomes. Once we label something, it turns into just another everyday object. The sense of awe disappears, and so does our spark of inspiration.

Imagine a child seeing a bird for the very first time—how innocently and wholeheartedly they experience it. But once the concept of "bird" takes shape in their mind, the bird becomes just another ordinary thing in the world, no longer capable of truly moving the heart. If something fails to move us, how can it spark inspiration or touch others?

Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child’——Matisse

It’s one thing to paint in someone’s style and another thing to paint the way that person painted You can mimic a master’s technique, but you can’t capture the spirit that way. Children aren’t consciously deciding on a style or aiming for realism. They just naturally feel and express whatever is around them. So when Picasso set out to “paint like a child,” he was really saying, “I want to feel and express the world as children do.”

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”— Pablo Picasso

This resonates with Laozi’s idea of Dao fa zi ran—the Way follows nature. As Picasso put it, we don’t copy nature; we create the same way nature creates. And maybe that’s exactly the attitude we need if we want to stay connected to our creative spark, no matter how old we get.