In his textbook Leisure, Roger Kelly captures the idea of transcendence with his comparison of play to art: “Play both suspends reality and heightens its meanings. It is like art in being more real, more full of meaning, than the everyday life that so easily passes without its significance being noted.” When one is playing or creating art, Kelly says, time seems to lose its meaning. Elizabeth Murray spoke of the liberating feeling of playing with paint for the first time. Inspired by Cezanne’s still-life Basket of Apples, she realized that painting provided her with a playful and transcendent experience.

The transcendent state Kelly refers to is further explored in Ellen Langer’s theory of mindfulness. Langer uses play as an example of mindfulness in the following statement:

1. (W)ith a sense of certainty, play is almost always mindful. People take risks and involve themselves in their play. Imagine making play feel routine; it would not be playful. In play, there is no reason not to take some risks. In fact, without risk, the pleasures of mastery would disappear. … We tend to be more adventurous at play because it feels safe. We stop evaluating ourselves. Play may be taken seriously, but it is the play and not ourselves that we are taking seriously—or else it is not really play at all.
   

Encouraging exploration of various options in a safe space, such as play, people encounter new ideas and modes of thinking. They experience self-knowledge in the moment of the mindful activity and risk-taking. In The Dialectic of Freedom, Maxine Greene stated, “We want to discover how to open spaces for persons in their plurality, spaces where they can become different, where they can grow.” These opportunities of growth occur when people learn something new about themselves without actually realizing the change. Providing opportunities for unconscious processes is an important factor in the young adult’s development of self. In White Gloves, John Kotre said, “Much of learning and creative inspiration result from the unconscious processes. So … does much of the shaping of the story of our lives.” Unconscious learning and creative inspiration create memories that children use to begin to question ideas and develop their identity. John-Steiner confirms Kotre’s statement in the following statement about the importance of early curiosity that stems from the unconscious processes.

1. It would be a mistake to see only a charming and childish curiosity in the early activities reported by these scientists and artists. They depict for us the ways in which, they were filling up, in their youth, some universal notebooks of their minds. Their wonder is mixed with lasting impressions; their play is pursued with intensity and determination. The shape of their more conscious efforts cannot be determined at such an early stage, but in their youth they collect some of the raw material they will draw on later. The discipline that will transform such material into novel and useful will come later in their lives.
   

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Each of the artists in Art and Play referred to stories from their youth that were recorded in the notebooks of their minds, as described earlier. The artists are able to contribute many of their creative endeavors to these experiences. Highlights are incorporated into the bibliography of each artist in Art and Play. Similar to play, presenting the art and stories of the artists is a powerful tool to teach, learn, create memories, spark imagination, start conversations, shape stories, and continue to grow. The following passage by Greene identifies how the subject of art lends itself to the divergent thinking necessary to promote playful behavior, which is presumably safe but not always comfortable.

1. (A)rt objects – not only literary texts, but music, painting, dance … have the capacity, when authentically attended to, to enable persons to hear and to see what they would not ordinarily hear and see, to offer visions of consonance and dissonance that are unfamiliar and indeed abnormal, to disclose the incomplete profiles of the world. As importantly, in this context, that they have the capacity to defamiliarize experience: to begin with the overly familiar and transfigure it into something different enough to make those who are awakened hear and see.
   

Participants of the creative process must go beyond their normal limits to take risks and move forward in the learning process. Although some of the artists’ biographies include difficult stories, they demonstrate how they used their art to evolve through trying times. The use of art leads to new ideas, which enlighten the creator. Duchamp’s The Box in a Valise (Boîte-en-valise) was inspired by the need to successfully smuggle his controversial artwork out of Nazi-occupied France. The solution to the imminent problem resulted in one of Duchamp’s most famous series of work. Greene continues,

1. (F)or those authentically concerned about the “birth of meaning,” about breaking through the surfaces, about teaching others to “read” their own words, art forms must be conceived of as ever-present possibility. They ought not to be treated as decorative, as frivolous. They ought to be, if transformative teaching is our concern, a central part of curriculum, wherever it is devised.
   

Understanding the importance and serious nature of exploring possibilities through art and play supports the foundation created in childhood from which creative individuals continue to draw from throughout their lives.