My daughter came home last week with a picture she'd drawn at nursery school. Her father is depicted in the garden, naked, with a huge red penis the length of his thigh between his legs.

When asked about it, she told me it was her birthday and while she was still asleep, her dad went outside to fetch the newspaper without dressing for the occasion.

Innocent? Naked fathers? Getting this child to a therapist will cost a fortune.

Despite worrying about her subconscious, it got me thinking about how transparent and unfiltered her drawings are, and what it says about making art.

There is the sad and horrible reality of losing this delightful creativity too soon.

In his now infamous work on creativity, journalist Jonah Lehrer quotes Picasso: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."

Lehrer explains that children don't censor themselves, but eventually "the brain matures and we become too self-conscious to improvise, too worried about saying the wrong thing, or playing the wrong note, or falling off the surfboard".

That's when, and how, we become boring and predictable. In Lehrer's case, he overcompensated for this. And as journalists can't be too creative, he has been fired from his job on the New Yorker for making up quotes from people like Bob Dylan.

But some people, like Brett Murray and his artist friends, maintain their creativity. We should love them for this.

At a recent exhibition opening of contemporary South African design, retailer Eugenie Drake, the best-dressed woman in Johannesburg, said with excitement at being surrounded by so much beauty: "I feel like I am in a glass of champagne."

And so it is that my dear child's creativitywill be nurtured and supported and her works displayed proudly in the hope she'll keep making drawings that delight me.