Splashing in a Mirrored Pool
on Christian Dimick and the Early Years
Ella Peacock
Untitled Drawing, 2026. Christian Dimick
To enter the first rooms of a childcare centre is to walk through a wall of sound.
Of wailing sobs and half-yelled nursery rhymes.
Among the maze of miniature furniture and nappied bodies, a few sticky, tearful toddlers can usually be found at the arts and crafts table. Presented with pencil and paper, toddlers, in their attempt to reconcile their clumsy bodies and the physical world around them, will make marks on the page erratically, curiously, every movement as much a surprise to themselves as to a spectator. When drawing, they merge with texture and sensation, fascinated by the tangle of colour and line that spills from their awkward grip. What delights them is not what is made, but the discovery of their effect on the world — of marks appearing where there were none before. What is made is something spontaneous and abstract, but ultimately of little concern to the young artist; their interest is in the act of making, not the product of it.
A few doors down, in the preschool room, the sound intensifies.
Twenty small voices competing for attention, bursting with the desire to express.
Set at the craft table, these wilful, curious children trace through memory and imagination, swimming in a limitless sea of symbols, dreams and associations, diving for a choice of subject. Children this young cannot lie — at least not convincingly, at least not in their artwork. What they choose to depict, and how they depict it, is instinctive and emotionally driven, reflective of their emerging consciousness. Where their grasp on language falters, wobbly figures and abstract scenes speak on their behalf. The familiar hallmarks of child-made art — distorted proportions, illogical arrangements of space, simplified forms — are not errors but intuitive arrangements of emotional value. The resulting works function as autobiographical vignettes, holding truths that exist only in the moment of their making. There are no tricks, no strategies, no self-conscious gestures, yet each unique constellation of marks is achingly sweet, painfully pure.
This capacity for emotionally transcriptive making is something we are all born with and something most of us gradually lose access to. Upon leaving the permissive environment of early childhood, we are asked to exchange our instinct for instruction, our imagination for convention. As schooling privileges language over image as a primary mode of communication, children are increasingly severed from the visual, symbolic subconscious they once inhabited freely. We continue to dream in pictures our entire lives, yet are rarely taught to trust images as a legitimate means of communication. It is precisely children’s lack of self-awareness and technical sophistication that allows them this freedom; their hand is led by sensation, memory, feeling, not restrained by concern for what something should look like, or how it might be judged.
There is a kind of quiet envy that adult artists carry for the natural ease with which children make art. For generations, artists have looked toward childhood as a site of lost authenticity — as a promiseland of untapped intuitive creativity that exists within, if only it can be accessed. Miró revered the rawness of children’s drawings and spent a lifetime attempting to return to their authenticity. Klee longed to “begin again”, to unburden himself of convention and reclaim qualities lost through academic training. Yet these desired returns were necessarily incomplete. The work they produced in service of this mission resembled children’s art in appearance, but could never fully recover its unselfconsciousness.
Untitled Drawing, 2026. Christian Dimick
What is lost in these attempted returns is not skill, but innocence of intention. To look back at childhood from the vantage of adulthood is to look through layers of knowledge, self-awareness, and history. The desire to return is already shaped by what has been learned, disciplined, mastered. The child does not seek authenticity — it lives inside it. The adult seeks it precisely because it has slipped out of reach.
The journey of creative development across a lifetime has been described as taking the shape of a horseshoe: where we begin as natural artists is the creative origin from which we depart until a homecoming is sought. The line curves, the second point reaches for the first. Despite efforts of return, the points never meet; the departure cannot be undrawn.
It is here — in this charged, unstable space between return and impossibility — that Christian Dimick’s work exists.
Within a lineage of attempts to retrace departure, Christian’s work reaches toward a different possibility: a sincere and deeply felt expression of the child within. Not as aesthetic conceit, but as an act of embodiment, and perhaps, transfiguration. Christian is not done with early life and, through the act of painting, enacts a line back to the source. He does not view early life as a place from which to move on from, but as a place where the essence of life can be revisited, a place worth resting in. Jung’s concept of the “child within” — the sense that “in every adult there lurks a child: an eternal child, something that is always becoming, never completed, and calling for unceasing care and attention” is embodied by Christian, living at the core of the adult and artist he is today.
The world Christian inhabits remains bright, humorous, and slightly askew. He is quick to laugh, playful by nature, and attentive rather than domineering toward his work. His practice is not something he seeks to master or control, but a friend he walks alongside. Christian does not make children’s art. What distinguishes his practice is not regression, but the refusal to sever himself from the child he once was. In him, the toddler, the child, the adolescent and the adult coexist. Rather than abandoning early modes of being in favour of professionalism or polish, his creativity has been protected and allowed to remain curious and strange.
Underpinning Christian’s work is an expansive and restless material intelligence. His paintings are not casual gestures, but the result of sustained studio practice, technical attentiveness, and ongoing experimentation with process. He moves between materials with curiosity and discipline, investing in specialist and often costly mediums, learning their particular resistances, weights, and possibilities. This growing expertise with paint does not tame the child within the work — it gives it range. The tension between embodied play and technical rigour is held open, productive and alive.
When painting, Christian approaches the canvas with an almost theatrical readiness — brush drawn, stage set. Audience of one watching, eager. He moves both body and brush haphazardly, comically, aiming to amuse, often testing the limits of what might be allowed. He seeks to surprise himself, to happen upon discovery. He’s present with the colour, texture, and form, actively immersed in intimate conversation. He is guided intuitively and follows faithfully, never demanding explanation or suffocating it with seriousness. Recurring symbols appear throughout his paintings, echoing those ubiquitous in children’s drawings. The codex gently unfolds, revisited again and again; Christian reprises what lies within. They emerge unconsciously, assembling themselves into narratives he did not necessarily intend.
I imagine his practice as a drawing of a house, a sun, a dog in the backyard
As a site of devotion
A window into the self
Untitled Drawing, 2026. Christian Dimick