Is Naïve Art About Drawing Like a Child or Thinking Like One?

A term that's been difficult to I vibe with is naïve art. It’s been bothering me for some time now - mostly because it’s one of my favorite form of art. I look up to our famous naïvistic painters and admire their amazing work, often described as “drawn like children.” But I keep wondering: is it the skill or the spirit of a child we’re trying to mimic as naïvistic artists?

Often dismissed as technically unsophisticated or celebrated as “charmingly childlike,” naïvism walks a thin line between admiration and condescension. But what if we’ve been looking at it all wrong from the start?

Jean-Michel Basquiat

What if naïve art isn’t about painting like a child - but about seeing like one?

The Sorcerer

That’s the premise I work from as a visual artist. One of my paintings, The Sorcerer, is a portal into this idea. It’s filled with surreal logic and irrational beauty: serpents emerge from three directions, disembodied hands cradle psychedelic eyes, and a high-energy light source condensed in a crystal-like ball casts spectral shadows across the scene. There’s chaos and play - but also control and composition. It isn’t “primitive.” It’s precise.

What makes it naïve, to me, isn’t the lack of technique - it’s the presence of untamed imagination. It’s how I imagined an evil sorcerer as a child.

A Child’s Mind: Raw, Open, and Honest

Children are often misunderstood in art. We praise their “innocence” and “purity,” but their visions can be wild, cosmic, surreal, and brutally honest. A child won’t hesitate to mix beauty and terror. They’ll draw death next to ice cream. Imagine monsters under their bed. Create mythologies out of boredom. See symbols where adults see rules.

So when we imitate children’s technical “errors” - flat perspectives and odd anatomy - without tapping into their imagination, we’re not honoring their vision. We’re just copying the surface, not the source. To me, naïve art means seeing through a child’s imagination - how they envision a sparkling castle, the cosmos, or other dreamlike scenarios.

Technique Is Not the Enemy of Naïvism

Lim-Johan, Sweden.

There’s a quiet myth that naïve art must be untrained. To be “true” naïve, the artist should be an outsider - uncorrupted by schooling. While there’s historical truth to that (see Rousseau, Lim-Johan), it’s also limiting. I feel caught between both worlds. I didn’t attend art school until my 30s and have been self-taught before that. But even in school, I never felt confined by a system. It felt more like an artistic society - curious, open, and rich in art history. It respected all forms of artistry, not just the classical.

To me, some of the most compelling visions come when an artist has the technique to express bold, surreal, emotionally direct ideas - and still chooses to work from the gut, from wonder, from absurdity.

That’s the kind of naïvism I believe in: technically literate, yet untamed.

Part of Lim-Johan painting

A (New) Kind of Naïvism

I paint with dry pastels. I use color boldly and draw with intention, without limiting the world I see. My perspectives and shadows often get distorted - maybe not exactly like a child would picture them, but close to how I remember thinking as a child.

I don’t pretend to be naïve. I’m an adult. I reflect, edit, and consider. What I aim to preserve is not the child’s hand - but the child’s lens. A way of seeing the world where magic is a given. Where things morph and float. Where mystery isn’t solved - it’s worshipped.

In The Sorcerer, everything is intentional. From the golden claw-like hands to the hypnotic spiral to the microdose tab - it’s a portrait of a mind in imaginative overload. A modern mystic powered by snakes and symbols. It’s playful, yes - but also serious. Serious in the way a child might imagine.

My old art teacher, Magdalena Ljung, once told me that although my paintings had

bright colors and childlike motifs, there was a subtle seriousness underneath. “At first glance you smile,” she said, “but the longer you look, the more your feelings shift.” I treasure that comment. I still hear it today.

Custom made, 2022

If we redefine naïve art not by how little an artist knows, but by how freely they imagine, we open a door. Not just for outsider artists - but for those who are technically skilled yet artistically loose. For those tired of irony, perfection, and conceptual

games - and who want to reconnect with the joy of seeing something for the first time.

The child’s eye is still inside us.

The question is:

Do we have the courage to let it see again - and the skill to let it speak?