Art of Childhood and Adolescence: The Construction of Meaning

The Art of Childhood and Adolescence

The Art of Childhood and Adolescence: The Construction of Meaning

John Matthews

UK Falmer Press, 1 Gunpowder Square, London, EC4A 3DE USA Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc., 325 Chestnut Street, 8th Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19106 © J.Matthews 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electror mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in from the publisher. First published in 1999 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-39739-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-39769-X (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 7507 0766 6 cased ISBN 0 7507 0765 8 paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available on r Jacket design by Caroline Archer Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to recti errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Notes on the Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

xvi

Chaos and Order: The Genesis of Expressive and Representational Thought

1

Introduction

1

Discussion

3

Meaningless Actions or the Beginnings of Representational Thought?

4

Dynamical Systems: Order within Chaos

6

The Four-dimensional Language of Infancy

10

Where Do Representational and Expressive Values Come From?

10

Perception of Shape

12

The Beginnings of Action Representation?

12

The Infant Moves Through Different Levels of Visual Structure

12

Expressive Play Between Caregiver and Infant

14

Conclusion

15

Meaningful Marks: The Beginnings of Drawing

16

First Marks

17

First Generation Structure

18

Second Generation Structure

21

Third Generation Structure

23

Does Drawing Development Require Early Mark-making Practice?

26

Conclusion

26

Actions and Shapes

28

Shape Representation and Action Representation

28

Emergent Writing

29

v

Chapter 5

The Structure of Objects and the Structure of Events

30

Movement as a Continuous Line and as Discrete Displacements in Time and Space

32

Children Distinguish Between the Structure of Events and the Structure of Objects

34

Investigation of Structure

37

Shape Is Action, Action Is Shape

39

Tadpoles and Conventional Figures

39

Shape Defined By Patches; Shape Defined By Line

40

Conclusion

45

Chaos and Order: Dynamical Systems in the Art of Young Children Patterns of Action: Dynamical Systems Experiences Constructed on the Drawing Surface Continuous and Discontinuous Displacements in Time and Space Closed Shape The Discovery of the Inside Right-angular Attachment and Core and Radial Electronic Paint Conclusion

Chapter 6

The Structure of Events and Objects Ascending and Descending Through a Vertical Axis Rising and Falling Arcs U-shape on Baseline Around and Around, Up, Over and Down The Discovery of the Invisible Two Axes or Two Views of an Object? Foreshortened Disks Movements Through Time and Space: Higher and Lower Relations, Going-through, Foreshortened Planes Emergent Writing Conclusion

Chapter 7

The View from Nowhere Intellectual Realism and Visual Realism

vi

Linda in Dungarees Conclusion Chapter 8

A Window on Consciousness Reality Takes Shape: The World as a Construction Emerging on the Drawing Surface The Deconstruction of Time Structural and Denotational Variation Different Types of Information Conclusion

Chapter 9

Point of View: Visual Representation in Later Childhood Movements in Space and Time: Depth and Distance Interaction and Provision Imaginary Views Planes, Cubes, Cones, Hemispheres and Spheres Spheres Ellipses Disappearing and Reappearing Conclusion

Chapter 10

The View from Room 26: Drawings of Adolescence The View from Room 26 The Construction of the Viewer Conclusion

Chapter 11

Representation and Human Freedom

154

Universality and Cultural Variation

155

How to Damage Your Child’s Drawing Ability

156

Conclusion: The Ecology of Representation

160

References

162

Index

167

Notes on the Figures

Figure 1. The beginning of representation and expression is formed within the interpersonal relationship formed between caregiver and infant. Six-month-old Keira plays a ‘Peepo’ game with her father. In such exquisitely orchestrated interplays of facial expression, vocalization and body movement (Trevarthen, 1980, 1995), she learns about line-of-sight; the characteristic trajectories of objects and, despite momentary occlusion of part or all of their coherent boundaries, the persistence of their identity. The infant is interested in the identity of objects and this requires building up understandings of their shape, location and movement. These understandings may form the content of later representation. Figure 2. First Generation Visual Structure: Horizontal arc and Vertical arc. The first drawing actions derive from natural movements of the body. The horizontal arc (on the left) is made from fanning movements of the drawing arm, forming a segment of an arc. The dots and dashes (to the right) are the result of the vertical arc, an up and down stabbing motion made with the held marker. In this drawing, horizontal arc is combined with vertical arc. Such very early drawings are investigations, made by the child, of visual and dynamic structure. Additionally, the infant may also give them expressive or representational meanings. This drawing, by Hannah, at age 3 years 10 months, is about ‘people standing in a crowd in the rain’. The horizontal arc represents the rain; the people are represented by the dots formed from the vertical arc. She may be representing the movement of the rain (action representation), and possibly the shape of the people (configurative representation), as if seen from a great distance. This would mean that she uses optical or apparent size difference to show depth relations. Figure 3. First Generation Visual Structure: Push Pull. This is the last in the trio of First Generation Visual Structure. When the marker is pushed and pulled to and from the Self, this results in a longitudinal line which, if the marker stays in contact with the paper, has acute angles at each end. Figures 4. Second Generation Visual Structure: Hannah learns that different kinds of action result in different kinds of shape. At 2 years 7 months she consciously experiments with different kinds of lines. She can make single straight lines, but in this photograph, drawing in spilt milk on a polyvinyl table cover, she makes a continuous rotation. This shape is the result of push-pull and horizontal arc being opened up. Figure 5. Second Generation Visual Structure: Continuous rotation, demarcated line endings, travelling zigzags, continuous lines and seriated displacements in time and space. At around the same time as the continuous rotation is formed, infants also become interested in the beginnings and ends of lines. They sometimes demarcate these with little dashes or other marks. When a push pull is opened up laterally, it becomes a travelling zigzag. We can see the beginnings of this at the bottom of this drawing. (More developed travelling zigzags may be seen in Figures 15 and 35.) The longitudinal lines are the beginning of a Third Generation Structure, parallelism. The beginnings of collinearity can also be glimpsed, in the association made between the direction of movement of a continuous line and a series of dots. Figure 6. Joel, at 13 months of age, investigates inside-outside relations. This topological relationship will, in just over a year’s time, be represented in two dimensions.

viii

Figures 7, 8 and 9. Third Generation Structure: Closure, inside/outside relations, core and radial, collinearity, parallelism, angular attachments, right-angular structures and U-shapes on baseline. Figure 7. Closed shapes can describe the face or volume of an object, or inside outside relations as is the case in this drawing by Hannah at 2 years 5 months. Figure 8. This drawing shows the core and radial, which is a special case of rightangular attachment. There are two types shown here. On the left, the rays are aligned along overall vertical and horizontal coordinates; on the right, the same child (a 3-year-old Singaporean), is trying to vary the angle of attachment of each line to the perimeter of the closure. Eventually, the child will be able to attach each ray to the perimeter line at approximately 90 degrees (see Figures 83 and 85, for example). Figure 9. U-Shape on baseline is derived from right-angular attachment. This shape occurs when the child realizes that a line attached to a baseline may be returned to the same baseline, forming a U-shaped enclosure. This is another very powerful structural principle. In combination with the other Third Generation Structures, the child will be able to produce new families of shapes. In this drawing, Ben (aged 3 years 2 months), has used it to draw the initial letter of his own name. Figures 10 and 11. Configurative representation and action representation. In order to understand the identity of objects, infants have to coordinate shape, location and movement. These understandings are reflected in their representations. Figure 10 is made of a continuous contact line in which a horizontal arc runs into a push-pull at approximate right angles, forming a cruciform shape. This is the beginning of the discovery of the powerful right-angular attachment principle. This drawing is a configurative representation—it shows the configuration or shape of an aeroplane. Figure 11 also is a representation of an aeroplane, but this is a quite different mode of representation. It is not concerned with showing the shape of the aeroplane, but rather its movement through time and space. This painting is an action representation. Figure 12. Configurative representation and action representation: Children begin to differentiate two main ways in which movement might be represented, as continuous line, or as discrete displacements in time and space. Ben’s drawing (made at 2 years 2 months) combines both ways of describing movement. It is about the game ‘Round and round the garden, like a Teddy bear’. To the left, the continuous, circular movement of ‘round and round the garden’ is shown and, to the right, the individual steps, up the arm, of the Teddy. The shape of the Teddy bear is also shown (configurative representation). The end of the journey is demarcated in terms of an action representation which shows the explosive tickle under the arm-pit. Figure 13. Action representations might show simple trajectories from A to B, or else they may show more complex events. For example, Hannah (3 years 7 months) draws someone walking along and falling over and into a dustbin. Figure 14. Configurative and dynamic aspects of an event are shown in a single painting. Here, Ben at 2 years 4 months, represents the tangled wreckage of the aeroplane, and also its vertical downward trajectory and moment of impact with the ground. Descending vocalizations and impact sound are synchronized with this final flight path. Discretely separated painting actions are each given their own colour; i.e., each action is colour coded. In this painting, Ben describes both changes of position, and changes of state, the latter being a consequence of the first. Young children might use painting to sort out the causal relations within events (George Butterworth, 1987, personal communication). Figure 15. A complex action representation by Hannah at 3 years 3 months 3 days. ‘The clouds are moving along and the rain coming down,’ she says. The rain is shown moving through two axes, through a vertical axis from the top of the paper downward (the travelling zigzags), and also as individual raindrops impacting on the ground (the dots at the right). Figures 16 and 17. The ascending descending arc, or inverted U-shape, describes ascent and descent, and higher and lower relationships in such objects as bridges and tables. Figures 16 and 17 are drawings by Ben at 3 years 2 months. Figure 16 shows the ‘train going over the bridge’, whilst Figure 17 shows ‘the train crashed under the bridge’.

ix

Figure 18 is by Hannah at 3 years 3 months. It is a development of the inverted U-shape. It is no longer rendered as a single line, but as a curved closure which may y specify width or volume. She says: ‘The train going over the bridge, and water goes under the bridge.’ Given the same conceptual concerns and the same strategies, similar content or subject matter recurs in young children’s drawings and paintings. Figures 19. This tadpole figure, drawn by Ben at 3 years 2 months, has facial features, hair, arms, legs, fingers, and even a penis. Here, the fingers are made from First Generation Structure; simply individual points clustered around the regions at the ends of the arms. Figure 20. A three-unit figure construction, comprising head, body and legs. This corresponds approximately to the so called ‘conventional’ figure. Figures 21, 22, 23, 24, and 25. Although the tadpole and then the conventional figure are thought (by some psychologists) to comprise two milestones in a supposed route to ‘visual realism’, in fact even very young children can produce a variety of differentiated figures. When children are not sure about the exact shape and location of the body unit, they use an undifferentiated patch as a ‘placeholder’ (John Willats, personal communication). Figure 21. Campbell, an Australian child, aged 3 years 4 months, uses ‘placeholding’ strategies, little patches of pigment, to indicate head, body, legs and even knees in his drawing. In Figure 22, a Singaporean 3-year-old makes two rotational shapes graze each other and adds two parallel lines to the base of the lower one, forming a head, body, legs sequence. Figure 23. Hannah, at 3 years 6 months 19 days, draws a ‘skirt’ over the legs of a tadpole figure. This action which results in head, body, legs sequence. Figure 24. By crayoning over the middle part of tadpole shape, Debbie Low, a 3-year-old Chinese Singaporean, clothes figures in a ‘dress’ and ‘swimming trunks’. Almost as a by-product of this action she, like Londoner Hannah, arrives at head, body, legs sequences. Figure 25. Ben’s drawing, at 3 years 3 months, of ‘Pilots and a King’, also shows the beginning of a differentiated body unit with the use of non-linear, shaded regions. Figures 26 and 27. Even 2-year-olds will differentiate in their drawings between quite subtle changes in contour characteristics of objects. 2- and 3-year-old Singaporean children are asked to draw a sausage-shaped and a spherical object placed before them. Leong Jun Wen, aged 2 years 8 months, draws a sphere as a circular closed shape (Figure 26), but the sausage-shaped object as an elongated closed shape (Figure 27). Figure 28. Even young children will sometimes show occlusion and hidden line elimination in drawing when, either the main characteristics of the shapes are not violated, or else the disappearance of one form behind or under another is a very salient aspect of the visual, kinaesthetic and tactile experience. Both factors may apply in drawings like this where legs disappear underneath or behind a skirt, as in this drawing by a 5-year-old Chinese Singaporean. Figures 29 and 30. Combinations of rotational and ascending and descending movements made in children’s play, in which hand-held objects are moved gracefully through orbits in three dimensions of space, whilst rotating upon their own axes. Whilst the objects are moved, this 4-year-old Chinese Singaporean boy carefully maintains his line-of-sight to the objects, monitoring the transformations which occur due to changes of position. Sometimes young children will even close one eye to obtain a monocular or single image of the object. Figure 31. Joel, at 2 years 11 months, draws climbers ascending, descending, and going through, a mountain. By enacting two directional axes of the mountain, its rotational axis and its ascending and descending trajectory, Joel arrives at two possible views of the mountain. The third directional axis, ‘going through’, is achieved by pushing his pen through the paper! Figures 32 and 33. Joel, 3 years 3 months. Hand-held figures pursue each other through the terrain of a hypothetical world created in representational play. As a consequence of maintaining the narrative and causal sequence in these imaginary worlds, the child learns manipulative and constructional skills. Of equal importance to this kind of incidental learning is the child’s understanding of different viewpoints. Joel purposefully searches for, and constructs, views of the

x

object. Like other young children, he is able to coordinate a range of interrelated lines-of-sight obtained by the agents in these imaginary worlds. He orchestrates their movements according to their imagined states of mind and viewpoints. In Figure 52, Character ‘A’ is out of the line-of-sight of Character ‘B’. Joel, of course, can see both figures, but is imagining what it would be like to be each of these figures, and what each character would see. As Character ‘A’ descends through the tube to escape ‘B’, so ‘B’s’ line-of-sight is adjusted in order to visually track ‘A’s’ descent (Figure 33). Young children are not as hopelessly locked into an egocentric state as Piaget imagined. In situations which make sense to them, even very young children can understand the spatial viewpoint of another person in a position in space other than their own. Figures 34 and 35. Going through is a directional axis explored across a range of media and incorporating a range of content. In Figure 34, the house is drawn in topological geometry, which captures its enclosing and inside-outside relationships. Father Christmas penetrates inside from outside, by going through the chimney whilst, in Figure 35, a travelling zigzag passing between two parallel lines describes music going through a trumpet (Ben, aged 3 years 3 months). Figure 34 is also of interest for its emergent writing. Whilst Father Christmas descends the chimney, to the right of the drawing, Ben is shown lying asleep in bed, but ‘Ben’ is represented by the lower case ‘b’ — ‘b’ for ‘Ben’. Drawing is a forum for the child’s investigation of the differences between pictorial symbols and arbitrary, conventional signs (see also Figures 43–8). Figure 36. ‘A Man Digging in the Ground for the Bones of Animals. Bones of Birds are in the Sky.’ A drawing by Ben, aged 3 years 3 months. Ben continues to consider and extend, above and below relations. Here, the line indicating the ground plane may have implications of a sectional view. Figure 37. In this drawing made by Ben at age 3 years 2 months, he represents himself spilling a glass of milk from his left hand, whilst holding a slice of beans on toast in his right. We have a notional line-of-sight of 90 degrees to his face, but a line-of-sight of 0 degrees, or a totally, ‘edge-on’ or foreshortened view, of the slice of beans on toast. The use of a closed shape to show a ‘face-on’ view of a flat object, and a line to represent a flat object seen edge-on, is more fully developed just over a year later (for example, see Figure 88). Figures 38, 39, 40 and 41. Singaporean 3-year-olds draw a hat with a circular brim, shown to them in two positions, with the line of sight directly to the underside of the brim (so that the brim is presented as a circle) or with the brim totally foreshortened. They have different solutions for representing the major axes of brim and crown. Some children represent the foreshortened brim as a line—but, though optically correct, they are not usually happy with this solution (Figure 38). The drawings suggest that children are quite sensitive to view-specific information but they are worried if encoding it means destroying the identity of the object. In Figure 39, it is as if the child is asking, ‘Do I draw the head in the hat, or the hat on top of the head?’ Other children seem to be showing the foreshortened brim but may well be thinking in terms of the brim stickingout from the crown (Figure 40). Figure 41 is an unusual example because, by enclosing the open triangle within the circular shape, Christopher may be moving toward a new denotational use of lines, in which lines show occluding boundaries of objects. For instance, the bottom ends of the triangle may suggest an occluding boundary which merges with the brim (Willats, 1997). Figure 42. A drawing by Ben at 3 years 3 months. Father Christmas arrives and parks his reindeers on the roof. This drawing involves all the drawing structures Ben knows about at this time. This is a complex drawing in which objects and events in time and space are organized along horizontal and vertical coordinates. Higher and lower relations are shown. The house is subdivided into lower and upper floors. The chimney and fireplaces on ground floor and first floor are shown in vertical relationship. The drawing captures information about both the structure of objects, and views of objects. For example, like Figure 34 the house is rendered in a topological scheme, which captures enclosure and inside outside relations, but is not concerned with Euclidean geometry—the particular shape of the contour of the enclosure is not important to Ben. The table, to the lower right, however, captures both information about the structure of object, and also suggests a possible view of the object. Again, the shape of the object in Euclidean terms is not important to Ben. He uses an inverted U-shape to describe its higher/lower axis. He shows on top of relations, by drawing shapes of

xi

objects on top of the table. In doing this, he also suggests a foreshortened, or edge-on, view of the table, upon which rest objects. The displacement of Father Christmas through two positions in time and space is also shown; firstly at his sleigh, then in his position directly above the chimney as he prepares to descend. Next to the table downstairs, Linda is vacuuming the floor. The parallel grouped lines at the base of the vacuum cleaner represent suction, as a piece of paper is about to be sucked up. Figures 43, 44, 45, 46, 47 and 48. Emergent or developmental writing. Figure 43. A drawing by Ben (3 years 3 months) of Father Christmas flying over the houses in his sleigh. Whereas in Figure 42, the curving, planar aspects of the reindeer antlers are shown, here, their prong-like aspect is captured. As in Figure 42, Ben is also investigating the nature of writing. The letters of his name, ‘b—e—n’ are shown inside the house, meaning that ‘Ben is in the house’. There may also be an unconscious pun on the word ‘letters’, meaning ‘letters to Father Christmas’. Other types of emergent writing capture the rhythmical, linearity of handwriting (see Figure 47, for example). Figure 44 shows three different ways of representing ‘horse’: the pictorial representation on the left; the Chinese Mandarin character ‘m ’; and the English word, ‘horse’. Figure 45. A Chinese Singaporean 4-year-old masters the oblique line junction. This new structure attracts her to any new examples in the physical—and written—environment. For example, it can be used to represent both the sloping attachment of arm to body, and the Mandarin character ‘xia’ which means ‘down’. Figure 46. The young child uses drawing as a forum for semiotic investigation. This drawing is about ‘A Spacecraft With Fire Going Through it, and Writing About it, and “B”for Ben.’ The ‘writing’ is directly above ‘B’ for Ben, and captures the rhythmical linearity of handwriting. The ‘writing’ is physically similar to the ‘fire’ which passes through the passage between the two parallels forming the spacecraft, but of course the representational values are quite different. Figure 47. At age 4 years 10 months, Hannah ‘writes’ a story about a swan. This emergent writing captures the rhythmical, linearity of handwriting. On the same page, the writing transforms into a drawing of a swan and then back again to writing. Though children do differentiate between pictures and writing, the difference is not always clear cut. It is as if children purposely need to test the boundaries of each semiotic system. Figure 48. This drawing by Ben at age 3 years 4 months is about ‘Six Boys with Flags’. As in the Chinese girl’s drawing of the Chinese character (see Figure 45), in Ben’s drawing there are some interesting multiple associations and possibly some punning. There are six boys represented and their flags look like sixes. Are these multiple associations merely the consequence of the child not fully differentiating between the different ways signs and symbols represent reality, or are they a more conscious play upon multiple meanings—like visual ‘puns’? Figures 49, 50, 51, 52, 53 and 54. Children capture and combine different types of information on the drawing surface; some which are to do with views of objects (viewercentred descriptions), and some which capture the main axes of the object irrespective of particular viewpoints (object-centred descriptions). Figure 49. A 6-year-old Londoner’s drawing of ‘Horses in a Field’. Figure 50 is a 4-year-old Singaporean Chinese child’s drawing of a table with a birthday cake upon it. Figure 51, is a drawing by Campbell, an Australian child, aged 4 years 7 months, of his family sitting around a table. Figure 52 is a drawing by a 6-year-old Londoner of three people around a table. Figure 53. In this interesting drawing by Goh Zhen Ying, aged 4 years 8 months, he tries different ways of representing a table. To the left is an object-centred description. At the lower right, he seems to capture another axis of the table (with chairs around it and objects resting on it), which suggests a sectional view. Dissatisfied with these drawings, he draws (upper right) two more images of the table which show notional views of people sitting at a table. Figure 54 is a London 6-year-old’s drawing of a bicycle which is placed in front of him. Figures 55 and 56. Young children are not always restricted to the tadpole form. Figure 55, drawn by Ben at 3 years 2 months, is an investigation of visual structures, including parallelism, vertical axis, and right-angular attachment. The investigation of such visual structures in two dimensions alerts the child to any examples of their presence within the

xii

environment and Figure 56, ‘Linda Wearing Dungarees,’ is an unusual example of these structures. In Figure 56, Ben makes a drawing of Linda from observation. This drawing is produced on the same day as the tadpole (Figure 19), but the transformational and denotational values of lines (Willats, 1985, 1996) are quite different from those in the tadpole. In Figure 56, he uses roughly parallel lines to show, not only the straps of her dungarees, but also the occluding contours of her body. On the left we can see the observable contours of her breast and waist, on the right, the small of her back and her behind. This drawing may be based on combinations of different kinds of knowledge, comprising topological, haptic and visual information. Figure 57. From about 2 years 7 months, Ben makes structural discoveries which are transferred between two- and three-dimensional media. The towers in this photograph are not buildings, but represent tongues of flame in a ‘fire’. This photograph records the culmination of a progression from dynamic to configurative thought. Initially, Ben represents the movements of flames in a ‘Fire’ by jumbling plastic straws through his fingers, whilst at the same time making fire noises. Gradually, over a period of about 10 days, he adds Lego and wooden blocks to this action representation, and eventually realizes the ‘Fire’ in configurative terms. This process of thought, from dynamic to configurative modes, also occurs in his drawings of this period. Figures 58 and 59. Different ways of describing an underground train going through a tunnel (Ben, 3 years 3 months.) Ben is trying to resolve a potential conflict between different sorts of information; the train passes through a tubular bound volume (Figure 58) yet this bound volume also has a circular shape (Figure 59). Figure 60. Journeys through time and space. This drawing shows Ben’s journey from nursery school to home, with Joel’s pram shown in two positions along the route. This is a serialized image which shows successive displacements of objects in time and space. Serialization of movements in time and space is built upon earlier understandings made during the so called ‘scribbling stage’, in which children monitor both the continuous journey of line and also break it down into its rhythmical, constituent parts. Drawings like this have narrative, logicomathematical, geographical and historical aspects to them. Figure 61 shows four successive displacements through time and space of a flying boat which takes off from the water and flies through the air, leaving trails of water behind it. Figure 62 also shows the successive displacements in time and space of single objects. ‘A King Falls Off a Castle, Losing his Crown on the Way.’ Here, two different trajectories are coordinated. Ben is considering the flight paths of objects which start off from nearly the same position but which have different destinies. Figures 63 and 64. Attractor systems guide the child’s search of the visual and dynamic environment and capture a variety of different content. For example, in Figures 25 and 62, grouped parallels stand for the King’s Crown, whereas in Figure 61 they stand for trails of water. In Figure 63, essentially the same visual structure stands for the tread marks of an Astronaut’s Footprint on the Moon (Ben, age 3 years 3 months), whereas in Figure 64 they have quite different denotational values. In this drawing by Ben, aged 3 years 4 months, about ‘Red Indians in the Long Grass With Flags,’ the parallel grouped lines stand for the long grass and the headdresses of Native North American people. Figure 65. A Dead Soldier. The decomposition of the soldier is simultaneously a deconstruction of visual structure. Figure 66. ‘A House: Darkness Outside. Darkness is at the Windows of the House.’ How do we interpret this drawing? Which vantage point do we have of the house? We seem to be simultaneously inside the house looking out at the darkness pressing against the windows, whilst at the same time we can see the entire shape of the house as if we are outside. Such drawings contain many kinds of ideas and feelings about experience, one of these being that the darkness is something which perhaps touches the windows. Figure 67. U-Shapes attached to U-Shapes make good towers, complex buildings and other multi-cellular structures (Ben, 3 years 3 months). Figure 68. ‘A Man Shooting a Wolf with a Bow and Arrow.’ A painting by Ben at 3 years 9 months.

xiii

Figure 69. An Excavator. In this drawing, at age 3 years 9 months, Ben puts together all the drawing structures he knows about. Note the development, from left to right, in the drawing of the spokes in the wheels. He is moving from a right-angular coordinate system to a compass-array structure. Figures 70, 71, 72 and 73. Children gradually use an oblique line junction, and this becomes a powerful attractor. Hannah’s drawings from 5 years 1 month 18 days, to 5 years 2 months 3 days show the interaction between the struggle for mastery and the investigation of structural variation. She masters the oblique line junctions and angular variation in moments-of-turn. Figure 70. Hannah draws the big dial she sees in a television programme. A spinning pointer on the dial is used to select a volunteer from the public to take part in a daring stunt. Tragically, in an accident, one such volunteer meets his death. Hannah’s drawings are about this man whose ‘number comes up’. Figure 71. She tries to copy my drawing of a cube (my drawing, top left; her drawing bottom left). Different types of knowledge about drawing and about the object vie with each other. Though Hannah knows the lines should slope, she is not sure which way they should slope, even with the two-dimensional model in front of her. After struggling to master the direction changes of line necessary to represent the cube, she then free plays with angular variation (to the right). It is this interaction between struggle for mastery and free play with structural variation which moves development along. Figure 72. The use of the oblique lines opens up for her a new vista of semiotic possibilities. Not only to show horizontal edges as orthogonals receding in space, and multi-directionally faceted objects, but also to investigate the structure of letter and number forms, and all manner of dials, clocks, and other compass-arrays. Figure 73. ‘…and something very frightening happened…’ In this drawing, obliquity and variation in directional axis allows her to represent deep x-rays bombarding her brother Ben’s brain tumour. Figure 74. In this picture, parallel oblique orthogonals have been added to what was initially an object-centred description of a house. A drawing by a child at 6 years 6 months. Figure 75. ‘A Steam Engine Coming Towards You.’ Ben, at 4 years of age, tries to capture different sorts of information, that which is about a view of the objects (viewspecific information), and that about the structure of the object irrespective of fixed viewpoint (object-centred information). Why does he show two sides of the carriage? Perhaps because he knows that the carriage is an object with two sides. Similarly he shows the main structure of the railway tracks, presenting these in proto plan. However, the two pairs of parallel oblique lines representing the top and bottom edges of the carriage walls, suggest a different sort of information—viewer-centred information. Like Figure 74, oblique lines represent what are in reality horizontal edges receding from a notional viewer. Figure 76 is by Chinese Singaporean Li Yu, aged 5 years. She used apparent or optical size difference to show a single object—an ocean liner, receding into the distance. Such drawings may be the result of children trying to capture, not depth relations per se, but the ‘going-awayness’ or ‘coming-towardness’ of an object in relation to their own imagined position in space. Figure 77. A carefully graded size magnification of a steam engine coming straight towards a notional viewer. This is an instance of the controlled use of apparent or optical size difference to show depth back through the picture plane. A drawing by Ben at 4 years 3 months. Figure 78. An extreme low angle view of a giant stepping over two people. Once children start to represent depth relations from particular viewpoints, or station-points, they may start to consider views from a variety of imaginary positions in space and time. Figure 79. Another extreme low angle view of a giant. Here, tiny figures unload the giant’s crown from a spacecraft and carry it over to the left, to crown the giant. By a series of platforms and ropes, Ben imagines the crown to arrive on the giant’s head. Although the shape on the paper representing the giant’s crown is physically much larger than the shape which represents the giant’s head, Ben imagines the crown will diminish in apparent or optical size as it moves towards the Giant’s head.

xiv

Figure 80. A drawing by Ben, aged 4 years 4 months, shows the nearer boot of the marching soldier as optically larger than his further boot. This device is developed in Figure 93, which shows a Native American walking straight towards a notional viewer. Figure 81. In this drawing of a steam engine, by Ben at 4 years 3 months, the oblique line represents a horizontal edge which recedes from the notional viewer. Unlike Figure 75, Ben only shows one side of the carriage, knowing that only front and side of the object can be seen from a single position Figures 82. Imaginary Figure. Drawing by Ben at 4 years 4 months. To show depth and the third dimension in drawings is only part of the agenda of children’s art. When Ben draws this imaginary figure (and the ones in Figures 83, 84 and 85), he seems to hold in mind the subject matter whilst simultaneously involving himself in the way that flat shapes integrate on a flat surface. It is this ability, to respond to the demands of the representational intention and whilst engaged in playful investigation of structure as of interest in itself, which seems to drive development. Figure 83. ‘A Strange Sailor Wearing Glasses.’ Drawing by Ben at 4 years 4 months. Figure 84. ‘Imaginary Figures and Fish.’ Drawing by Ben at 4 years 4 months. Figure 85. ‘The Sun in Cowboy Country Wears a Sheriff’s Hat and Gun Holsters.’ Drawing by Ben at 4 years 5 months. Figures 86, 87, 88. These powerful drawings of ‘Pirates Fighting’, by Ben at 4 years 6 months, show kinaesthetic and optical information, whilst at the same time the drawing is rendered in terms of flat shapes integrated on the twodimensional surface. The shapes are twisted dynamically through space to show movement. View-specific information includes the rotation of disks through 90 degrees (the totally foreshortened hilts of swords in Figure 88). Additionally, by the time he is drawing Figure 88, he is using occlusion and hidden line elimination, for example, where limbs, body, and shoes of a further pirate disappear and reappear behind the body, legs and shoes of the nearer one. Figure 89. ‘The Rolling Sea, the Rain and Spanish Galleons.’ Drawn by Ben at 4 years 6 months. Figure 90. ‘Soldiers Fighting with Cutlasses.’ In this drawing, made by Ben at 4 years 6 months, he uses the rectangle of the drawing surface itself to select a sample of an imagined visual array. We have a very close up view of one soldier, so close that we can see the pock marks on his face or perhaps the dents in his helmet. Figure 91. A drawing by Ben at 4 years 6 months of ‘A Battle with Knights in Armour’. Ben designs the subject matter in terms of two-dimensional shapes and their interaction on the drawing surface. These shapes are twisted and skewed through space to show dynamism. Some kinds of teaching, with its naïve, limited and limiting ideas about ‘correct’ proportion, Euclidean geometry, and visual realism, prevent this kind of development. Figure 92. A drawing by Ben at 5 years 1 month of ‘A Standing Knight and a Knight on Horseback’. Figure 93. A drawing by Ben at 5 years 1 month of a ‘Red Indian Walking Towards You’. Figure 94. ‘Cyclists Coming Straight Towards You.’ In this drawing of 5 years 1 month, Ben develops his representation of view-specific information, conceptualizing a bicycle as a roughly flattish object here seen front wheel on. Figure 95. Direction of travel is also important in this drawing, made by Ben at 5 years 4 months. When I point out to him that he has inverted the words, ‘Aha there pirates,’ Ben laughs and says, ‘Oh, the words come out of his mouth that way’ (!) The words come out of his mouth in essentially the same way as the cannon ball comes out of the mouth of the cannon, at the lower left. Figure 96. ‘Spacecraft’ drawn by Ben at 6 years 6 months, after seeing the ‘Star Wars’ movie. Although he now draws more rigid forms, these have in no way lost their earlier dynamism, and increasingly are conceived of as extensions of an overall space. Figure 97. A drawing by Ben, aged at 6 years 8 months, of a large spherical, artificial satellite, ‘The Death Star,’ derived from the ‘Star Wars’ movies. Figure 98. This drawing by Ben, aged at 6 years 6 months, of a ‘Flying Saucer’, is rendered as a conical form. Figure 99. Another ‘Flying saucer’, drawn by Ben, at 6 years 6 months, is rendered as a half sphere.

xv

Figure 100. At 8 years 2 months, Ben succeeds in making The Death Star’ look more spherical, with the use of interior edges and occluding contours (Willats, 1997). Figure 101. ‘Skateboarders.’ Ben’s drawing at 6 years 10 months. This striking drawing combines occlusion and interior occluding edges, to show a notional low angle view of the skateboarders. Figure 102. Ben’s interpretation of another scene from a ‘Star Wars’ movie, at 6 years 11 months. He combines many devices to show depth relations, including a carefully calibrated optical size gradation, transformations of flat planes as if rotated through various orientations to the notional viewer, interior edges and occluding contours. Figure 103. The projective geometry in this drawing, by Ben at age 7 years 7 months, is close to linear perspective. The reason he has abandoned the further vane of the spacecraft is that he is as yet unsure about how to make its orthogonals also converge at the same vanishing point. Figure 104. A machine derived from a ‘Star Wars’ movie, by Ben, aged 9 years 2 months. Ben’s mastery of showing carpentered objects in a clearly articulated three-dimensional space has not lessened the vitality of his drawing, quite the reverse. This is because he is representing, not just forms, but the movements of forms through three dimensions of space plus the dimension of time. Figure 105. ‘A Motorcycle Made Completely Out of Bananas,’ by Ben, aged 7 years 1 month. Figure 106. ‘A Dead Soldier Lies at the Edge of the Sea.’ A pencil drawing by Ben, aged 9 years. Figure 107. ‘Father Christmas Revisited.’ In this drawing, by Ben at 9 years 4 months, Father Christmas now is equipped with modernized rocket sled. We can see the very shiny nose of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Ben’s ability to show dynamic movement is used to humorous effect in the image of the two little helpers hanging on perilously to the rope ladder. Figure 108. ‘Riding the Dragon.’ A pencil and watercolour drawing by Ben at age 12 years. Figure 109. ‘Midnight Obs.’ At age 15 years Ben nearly dies from a brain tumour. His drawings and paintings show his descent to near death and his gradual recovery. In this painting, a hospital night nurse, making her midnight observations, leans towards Ben and shines a pencil torch directly into his eyes. In paintings like this, the young artist makes the viewer of the picture adopt his own viewpoint. Teenage artists have the potential of realizing the manipulation of viewpoint for psychological effect. Figure 110. ‘Conquering Heroes.’ Teenage artists are more able to consciously control metaphor and the use of multiple layers of meaning. Figure 111. ‘Head on a Spike.’ Self portrait, Ben 15 years. Decapitation is a recurring theme in drawings and paintings at this time, as is a crumbling, gaping hole in masonry. Figure 112. ‘Ye Olde Cure for Brain-Tumas’. Figure 113. ‘The Master of Ceremonies Stands in the Doorway’ or ‘Please Step This Way.’ Figure 114. ‘Stumbling Hero.’ Ben, aged 15 years. Figure 115. ‘Stumbling Hero 2.’ Ben, aged 15 years. Figure 116. ‘Rise and Fall’ Ben, aged 15 years. Figure 117. ‘Absorption.’ Ben, aged 15 years.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people for sharing ideas with me: My wife Linda, Chris Athey, Tina Bruce, Elsbeth Court, Alan Costall, and John Willats. I also want to thank Rebecca Chan and her early childhood teachers. Thanks to Marian Whitehead for showing me the drawing in Figure 74; Linda Gan for showing me Campbell’s drawings; and Jean Beagles for showing me the drawing in Figure 49. Some of the illustrations originally appeared in my book, Helping Children to Draw and Paint in Early Childhood: Children and Visual Representation, 0–8 Series, Series Editor Tina Bruce, published by Hodder & Stoughton Educational.

Chapter 1 Chaos and Order: The Genesis of Expressive and Representational Thought

Introduction The scene is a nursery class. A group of eight children, average age three years, are sitting around a table drawing five models intended to represent human figures. Each model is made of two plasticine ovoid volumes, attached in a vertical alignment, the top ovoid smaller than the lower, representing the ‘head’; the larger, lower ovoid representing the ‘body’. The ‘legs’ of these figures are made from two rods, inserted into the lower ovoid. There are no ‘arms’. The children have arrived at various solutions for drawing these figures. Some just draw elliptical shapes from vigorous rotational movements of their drawing hands. Some of these children are singing as they draw, the cadences of their voices matched to the emphatic thrusts of their pencils. Other children have found a way of showing two, joined, roundish volumes, by overlapping two rotational or closed shapes—roughly circular linear closures. Other children draw series of straightish, parallel lines. Perhaps they are drawing the legs of the figures. A few children draw a single closed shape with two lines attached—known as the ‘tadpole’ figure—even though the three-dimensional models have two connected round forms. Similarly, even though there are only two rods attached to the three-dimensional model before them, some children do not stop when they have attached two lines to their single closure, but go on to add many more. It is as if they find the repeated action of attaching these rays to the perimeter of a closed shape irresistible. A few of the children make drawings in which two elliptical or circular closures are attached along a vertical axis, with two vertical, parallel lines adjoined to the underside of the lower oval. These drawings could be said to visually correspond to a notional view of the objects. Other children however, do not seem to look at the models at all, and their drawings seem in no way to resemble them. For example, a girl called Wen Hui makes a zigzag line. Other drawing actions seem, at first glance, to be quite haphazard, and easily influenced by random events, as if the children have difficulty concentrating on a single task. Some children’s drawing seems influenced by subtle, barely detectable events. Sounds and movements in the environment seem to repeatedly deflect the course of their drawing. Other children, who initially capture in their drawings some of the observable characteristics of the objects (two linked closures with two straight lines), seem to quickly lose track of the original task of drawing the model figures. They repeatedly draw these components with great enthusiasm, but as isolated elements, without any apparent regard for the observable models. Given the nature of some of random disturbances that occur, it is not always surprising that children’s drawing procedures should sometimes be affected. One such disturbance is a sudden flash of lightning, followed quickly by a crash of thunder, and heavy, falling rain. Immediately upon hearing this, a boy called Evan makes a sudden drawing action involving his pencil being pressed hard against the paper and then pulled and pushed vigorously to and from his body. As he makes this mark he says, ‘Aaaaaaaa…’. Then, he raises his pencil high above his head and, with an over-arm action, aims it down into the pencil box on the table, saying ‘Aaaaaa…’ as his moving hand describes a descending arc in

2

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

space and ‘Bfff!’ at its moment of impact, after which he lets the pencil go. He then presses his palms down flat on his drawing, pursing his lips in a pressured, concentrated way whilst screwing up his eyes. His mien suggests a suppressed shout is about to burst from his lips. He then raises both hands together back to his shoulder level and, still making his extraordinary grimace, brings both arms down together to land palms down on his drawing, at which point he relaxes his facial muscles into a smile. Sitting next to him, his friend Aaron echoes these actions, making vigorous pushpulling actions of his pencil, whilst intoning ‘Aaaaaaaaa…’. Then, with a similar overarm action, he aims his pencil into the box, saying ‘Aaaaaaaa…’ as his hand descends, and ‘Bfff!’ when the pencil arrives in the box and is released from his hand. Then he moves both hands up together into the air for a brief moment, rotates them in unison so that they are palm uppermost, before allowing them to fall, as if lifeless, palm uppermost, onto his drawing. Evan succeeds in drawing two rotational marks, which he differentiates in colour. Then he says very quietly, ‘Fire’. A teacher happens to be nearby and hears this. ‘Did you say “fire”?’ she asks. Evan explains: ‘One of the giants is on fire,’ as he makes vigorous horizontal arcs of his empty palm over the drawing. The teacher says: ‘Orange is a good colour.’ Evan then draws four lines; three vertical and one horizontal. ‘All the rest of the men!’ he says. ‘Bop! Fire! Booooo! Ooooooh!!!’ he exclaims, making a variety of marks. His actions seem to quickly influence his friends. Pei Ji, sitting next to him, to his left, has made a closed shape in which she places a rotational mark. She leans over to Evan to tell him she is drawing a ‘fire’. Evan leans across and, with a light, downward tap of his pencil, makes a little mark inside her closed shape. She smiles happily. The teacher asks: ‘Why do you keep saying “fire”? There’s no fire.’ Evan looks up at her and, touching the rotational shape on the paper, says, ‘There’s the orange fire’. Then, Evan and his friend Aaron almost in unison make intense rotational marking movements, rhythmically chanting as they do so: ‘Fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire fire…’ ‘I thought you said they look like snowmen?’ their teacher tries to remind them. (Earlier, she had suggested that the models looked like snowmen.) She seems to be trying to divert them back to the original task of drawing the models. Although he does not look up, Evan is in fact listening, for he slows up his drawing action and, with the pencil held vertically against the paper, makes a strong lateral line to the left and then back to his right, resulting in a long, sharply pointed closure. ‘Can you look at these things and draw? Evan? Evan?’ the teacher persists, trying to gain his attention. ‘Yes!’ He squeaks excitedly, nodding his head enthusiastically, making sudden fanning motions from side to side with his crayon. A fourth child, Jia Hao, who has also succeeded in drawing two vertically aligned elliptical closed shapes, now joins in, making combinations of arcing lines and dynamic zigzags over his original drawing in time to Pei Ji’s, Aaron’s and Evan’s chanting, ‘Fire fire fire…’ and his own, more moaning vocalization. ‘Are you looking at these things, Evan? Aaron?’ asks the teacher. There is a momentary pause. Evan screws up his eyes and, with his head and neck retracted in exaggerated tension, his lips taut, with an outsretched arm, raises the pencil above his head and brings it down in a forceful yet controlled trajectory to the paper. As the point of the pencil touches the paper, he starts a ‘Shssshhhhhhhhhhhh!’ sound that is continued over the ensuing arcing movements of his pencil. ‘Don’t forget to look at these things and draw,’ the teacher is saying. ‘Fire fire fire fire,’ says Aaron as he makes an orange rotational mark. Evan says: ‘Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiire!’ This vocalization is prolonged over five seconds, as he makes horizontal arcing movements at frenetic speed, whilst shaking his head from side to side very fast. These arcing movements are momentarily translated into rotational elliptical marks before suddenly, with a light tap of his pencil, his drawing comes to an end. He looks up. The fire has ‘caught on’, so to speak, and other children murmur ‘Fire, fire, fire, fire’. But Evan has finished. The teacher, perhaps a trifle relieved, asks: ‘What happened? Did they die already? Where’s the snowmen?’ Evan desperately tries to express something in words and finally manages to say, ‘The wind blow the snowmen away’. Aaron picks up the theme, saying, ‘The wind blow the snowmen and so they fall’. As he says this, he mimes gracefully with his

CHAOS AND ORDER: THE GENESIS OF EXPRESSIVE AND REPRESENTATIONAL THOUGHT

3

hand, a slow-motion rising, turning over, and falling of his hand, which impacts with the table to coincide with his saying the word ‘fall’. Discussion This above description is derived from a microanalysis of a video-recorded observation of nursery children in a drawing experiment designed by the present writer. The sequence was recorded in Singapore and involved predominantly Chinese children, with a few Malays and Indians. However, the actions presented by the children are essentially identical to those recorded and analysed by the author in London, England (Matthews 1990, 1994a). At a deep level of description there is a universality about these actions. Later, we will look deeply into this controversial idea, and analyse what it is which is universal, and what it is which is culturally specific. For the observation above is part of a longer study of the origin, nature and development of visual representation and expression. In fact it is unusual for very young children to draw directly from observable objects in their spontaneous drawing and it is a somewhat artificial situation to ask them to do so. Studies of children’s art and drawing based solely upon experimental data always distort descriptions of development. This being so, the intention of the present study is to identify the uses to which children themselves, spontaneously, put visual media. Artists, psychologists and lay-persons all have their own ideas about what constitutes a ‘good’ visual representation, but what are children’s priorities and issues when they paint, draw, construct with clay or blocks, or even when they dance and sing? To try to find some the answers to these questions, this book is based on naturalistic observational work in an attempt to locate the development of visual representation within the context of the development of representational and expressive thought as a whole. Experimental work, as in the observation with which we started, was occasionally involved to tease out and highlight certain issues that are sometimes difficult to see in naturalistic situations. Additionally, I wanted to test some of the assumptions behind the experimental work of others. For example, much experimental work on children’s drawing investigates how children learn to draw recognizable pictures of recognizable objects. Many psychologists are especially interested in how children learn to draw objects and human beings. Some of the most dominant ideas about development in visual representation derive from studies of how children learn to draw objects and human beings. But how reliable are these ideas? Do they really tap children’s true motivations? Do such studies, which assume that the path of development is toward recognizable pictures of recognizable objects, really capture the significance of children’s visual representation and expression? I made my own experiments, in which children were encouraged to draw human figures, or to draw objects from observation, but I was able to place these findings within a theory derived from my naturalistic studies of children’s spontaneous visual expression and representation. I compared these findings with other interpretations, made by other people, which were based solely on experimental studies. The book describes and reinterprets the origin, nature and development of representation and expression. By ‘representation’, I mean when we use an object, or an action, or a shape, or a process or event to stand for something other than itself. This ‘something’ could be another object or an event. Representations may be ‘re-presentations’ of prior events or existing objects, but they need not be so. ‘Representation’ here means the active and creative construction of the world in a range of media. The structure of a ‘representation’ derives from a knowable aspect (or aspects) of objects or events. This means that that a letter, or word, or numeral is not a representation but is a symbol or sign, since the structure of a letter or word or numeral is arbitrary and conventional. A representation is different from a symbol or sign. Anything may be used to symbolize or signify something else but structures that form a representation must resemble, in one way or another, the structure of an entity or entities in the world. The ways in which representational structures resemble structures in the

4

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

world are many and can be subtle and complex. The term ‘resemblance’ is not solely tied to the notion of pictorial resemblance. By ‘expression,’ I mean when an action, an object, a shape, a process, or event is used to convey, communicate, or simply release an emotion, feeling or mood. We will start from an analysis of children’s actions that most adults consider meaningless, including forms of visual representation most adults do not recognize. We will see that these apparently chaotic actions form the basis of all later symbolic and representational thinking. Furthermore, we will see that this development requires a special kind of support from the interpersonal and social environment if it is to fully flourish. Lacking these certain optimal conditions for growth, we jeopardize children’s intellectual and emotional development. Meaningless Actions or the Beginnings of Representational Thought? For many people, including lay-persons, psychologists, artists and educators alike, most of the actions described above are random, impulsive, chaotic; devoid of any educational value in any serious sense. Some of the actions might be grudgingly termed ‘play’ and therefore allowable in certain circumstances—perhaps as a relaxation from the important process of education. Other actions described above would not even be accorded this dubious status. The shouting and wild arm and body movements in the ‘fire’ scenario, for example, would be considered by some as even more lowly than ‘play’ — a mere ‘mucking about’. While some observers might concede the presence of an embryonic meaning, this is often in terms of supposed ‘primitive’ beginnings of the more ‘advanced’ cognitive behaviours supposed to come. The children’s specific drawing actions will serve as an example here. Many people assume a route from apparently meaningless ‘scribbling’ to recognizable depictions of recognizable objects. These people might be alert to a few milestones on this long march to ‘correct’ ‘visual realism’. One of these might be what is often thought to be the first recognizable depiction of the human figure, the ‘tadpole’ figure. This is a single, roughly circular closed shape with two parallel vertical lines attached beneath it. A second landmark might be spotted further down this road—the so-called ‘conventional’ figure—a drawing in which two roughly circular shapes are connected in vertical alignment, with two vertical parallel lines beneath. In the observation above, we can see that a few children seem to draw the observable objects, in the sense that their drawings capture some of the characteristics of the models as if seen from a notional viewpoint or ‘station-point’. These drawings are similar, in some respects, to the ‘conventional’ figure. Are the other children merely failing? Are we correct to assume a single, ‘natural’ route towards recognizable configuration, with so-called random ‘scribbling’ giving way to charming but essentially incompetent figure drawings? Do these, in turn (perhaps with the help of instruction), gradually attain increasing verisimilitude to the ‘way things really look’? In this book, I am going to challenge these assumptions. Consider, for a moment, a small detail of this supposed development. Is it simply axiomatic that the ‘tadpole’ figure is ‘inferior’ to the figure with ‘head and body’? Only if we accept a certain adultomorphic hierarchy based on naive paradigms of both anatomy and representation per se. The human figure may be conceptualized and differentiated in many ways. A dancer, an anatomist, a Tai Chi player, and an Australian aboriginal artist may all have different representations of the human body. The ‘conventional’ figure is a convention only when naive realism meets naive anatomy—not in the minds of children but in the minds of certain experimental psychologists. But there are other underlying assumptions concerning the nature of representation, which may obscure our understanding of its genesis in infancy. Many accounts of the development of children’s drawing seem to assume that some of the children’s actions described above are simply irrelevant to drawing proper. In our sample observation, the children’s apparent ‘scribbling’, their repetitive vocalizations, their impulsive body and limb movements, their extraordinary grimaces—all

CHAOS AND ORDER: THE GENESIS OF EXPRESSIVE AND REPRESENTATIONAL THOUGHT

5

such actions are usually considered ‘over inclusive’ actions, extraneous to the drawing act proper (Laszlo and Broderick, 1985). Such notions derive from an unexamined assumption that drawing is necessarily about the unambiguous depiction of objects and scenes as observed from a particular position in space, or ‘station-point’. This derives from a largely western-ethnocentric paradigm but, as we shall see in later chapters, some non-western societies have different but equally limiting expectations of children’s imagery. What these different exemplars have in common is that they all derive from naive conceptions of picturing. If capturing ‘frozen’ visual arrays (Gibson, 1979) was really the sole purpose of drawing, then clearly most of the children in the observation are failing utterly to achieve this objective. But is this the whole story? Could it be that something very important about the beginnings of representational thought is being concealed by this unquestioned paradigm? This book will probe below the surface of these unexamined assumptions about the nature and role of representation. What does it mean to talk about ‘the way things really look’? What is the true shape of a cat or a cloud? (Marr, 1982). We will be finding out whether it is possible to describe such things, and whether, by studying human development, we may gain some insights about visual representation and the arts. Conversely, we might find out whether by studying the development of representation we may learn something about human development. It will be shown that children’s actions like those described above, far from being chaotic, have an internal structure and systematicity. They are not meaningless, but play an important part in cognitive and affective development. Such actions are part of the formation of complex descriptions of a reality, which have visual, haptic, kinaesthetic and kinematic aspects. The book will show that the child’s representation of the observable characteristics of objects and regions within the visual field is part of a much larger project, requiring the coordination of a range of attributes, which includes the structure of objects and their appearance within the visual field, but which also includes, mass, weight, movement, duration, speed, amplitude, rhythm, tempo, stress and cadence. Children detect and exploit these as expressive characteristics inherent in visual media (Smith, 1983, 1992) and also organize them as components in a complex representation of reality. The book will show that children bring to media of very different types—from dance to drawing, from traditional paint to electronic paint—the same deep, underlying strategies (Matthews and Jessel, 1993a). The book will focus particular attention on the example of children’s visual representation in drawing. We will see that children’s complex descriptions of reality are not merely abandoned in favour of a mode of visual representation that captures only views of objects from fixed station-points. Rather, the cluster of actions we see in infancy and early childhood forms the substrata for later models of reality. Drawing is part of this family of expressive and representational modes and its organization reflects the structure of the group as a whole. As such, drawing is not dependent on the linear derivatives of objects (Rawson, 1982). In fact, as Rudolf Arnheim remarked, drawing is not primarily concerned with the representation of objects at all, but is to do with an interplay of forces (Arnheim, 1986). The book will show that this complex of expressive and representational modes, of which drawing forms a part, is never random or meaningless but exhibits semantic and organizational characteristics from the outset. The actions described above form a continuum that eventually shapes adolescent and adult thought. It will be shown that this development, though initially self-driven, nevertheless does require sensitive support and interaction from adults sufficiently educated in the development of representation and expression. Furthermore, it will be shown that, whilst the systems generated by the child are quite robust, persisting across cultures and even in quite hostile conditions, some contexts will cripple the ability to marshal representational and expressive modes. Might this have long-lasting negative effects on the person’s ability to initiate and sustain original and autonomous thought? There seem, after all, good reasons why one should take an interest in the apparent chaos of those children’s actions in the nursery.

6

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Dynamical Systems: Order within Chaos Microanalysis of the children’s actions described above reveals an exquisite orchestration of different sensory channels, working in harmony to compose the structure of events and objects. As we will see in later chapters, visual descriptions of the shape and form of objects are at least partially derived from ‘event scripts’. In these representations of unfolding events, the child analyses and reconstructs objects as semiotic processes. Far from being haphazard, such event structures are delicately organized, involving subtle and accurate cross-modal associations between actions occurring in different sensory domains. In carefully calibrated actions of facial and body movements, speech, song, and the unfolding event of the drawing itself, children seem to detect characteristics that remain essentially similar. It is upon such connections formed between what might first appear (to some observers) to be entirely different and unrelated actions that the child constructs a meaningful world which has aesthetic and expressive dimensions. A superficial evaluation of Evan’s and Aaron’s actions described on pp. 2–3, for instance, might be that they are merely careless and inappropriate, indicating that they have lost track of the drawing task. However, further examination reveals that their actions, far from trivial, in fact signal the beginnings of extremely important representational thought. This is possibly initiated when Evan aims his pencil in a descending arc into the pencil box. He may have been describing the lightning flash as a sudden discharge of energy. Microanalysis reveals that Aaron’s and Evan’s actions are not aggressive or wild—quite the reverse. The action of each child is a carefully controlled and graceful enactment of descending flight, underscored and emphasized with descending vocalization. The end of each trajectory is perfectly punctuated with the appropriate onomatopoeic vocalization. This coincides with the moment-of-impact in perfect one-to-one correspondence, acting like an exclamation mark to this visual and kinematic description. They are representing downward flight. There is another level of meaning to this type of action. Aiming the pencil into the box is a part of the conceptual concern of inside-outside relationships. In this case, the concern manifests itself in three dimensions. However, when, seconds later, Evan stabs the inside of Pei Ji’s closure, this conception is already in the process of being encoded into two dimensions. This interpretation is not based on slender evidence. As will be made clear in later chapters, this topological understanding, inside-outside, is part of a family of very robust conceptual concerns that occupy an important place in development. These emergent conceptions drive Aaron’s actions too. He does not merely copy Evan’s actions but, with equal grace, elaborates on them, adding variations to the theme. We will see in later chapters that imitation, whilst playing a part in development, is not its main mechanism. Children are able to imitate only to the extent that they themselves are generating the same patterns of action. The pedagogical implications of this are far reaching. Neither are we looking at a group activity here. There is a complex interplay between the children, but each child acts autonomously, independently, interpreting influences very individualistically. A frame-by-frame analysis of the video-recording of just one child, Evan, reveals a mutual reciprocity between his vocalizations, drawing actions and actions of other parts of his body. These different actions, made in synchrony, seem to echo and analogue each other. His drawing action is continuously monitored and adjusted with respect to the confines of his paper and in relation to variations in stress, tempo and cadence of both his own speech and that of others, as well as even random events occurring in the vicinity. Reciprocally, there are momentary rests between words, or bursts of speech, in which the emphasis and characteristics of the marking action are changed with the change of morphemes. The entire episode may be organized according to the structure of conversational topics in natural language use (Chafe, 1994). This organization is prefigured in the ‘interactional synchrony’ (Condon, 1975) between mother and infant (which I will describe in Chapter 2). In these ‘proto-conversations’ the infant detects the expressive characteristics inherent in his or her body actions and the unfolding effects of interaction with, firstly, another person (Trevarthen, 1995) and, later, with media. Such events are part of a dialectical relationship formed between the child and the environment— especially the interpersonal environment (Piaget, 1951; Vygotsky, 1986; Wolf, 1989), in which elements of the world

CHAOS AND ORDER: THE GENESIS OF EXPRESSIVE AND REPRESENTATIONAL THOUGHT

7

become the currency of symbolization. From this dialectical relationship the child constructs a model of reality upon which all later thinking will be based. Such episodes reveal the child as a sensitive medium, monitoring and representing all kinds of ‘random perturbations’ (Dennis Atkinson, 1992, personal communication) within the environment. However, the influence of chance events on children’s drawing should not be taken to mean that development is completely unpredictable and idiosyncratic. In later chapters we will see that the structures generated from within the children are dynamic systems which attract some—but not all—input from the environment, transforming it into a reconstruction of reality. The children are responsive to a variety of input, organized into coherent patterns by the dynamic systems generated by children. A system may even incorporate the direct interference of another person—if the incoming actions fit into it. An example of this is Pei Ji’s happy acceptance of Evan’s pencil stab into her closed shape. Note that Evan’s action—enclosing a small mark inside her closure—‘fits’ into Pei Ji’s drawing procedure. Evan performs no other type of action upon her work. Nor is his action aggressive. It is more in the nature of a collaboration between them, a conversation on a theme. Very young children are certainly interested in the observable shape of objects. My experimental work (which I will describe in Chapter 4) as well as my descriptive, naturalistic studies shows that even 2-year-olds try to differentiate in their drawings between differently contoured volumetric solids. This is in contrast to Piaget and Inhelder (1956), who thought that very young children reduce all contours of any shape to generalized, undifferentiated topological schemes, in which they succeed in capturing only boundary, closure, hollowness and inside-outside relations. Young children also incorporate into their drawing other influences and conceptual interests. In addition to reconstructing the shape and form of objects, they may represent the structure of events, and we have seen the beginnings of this above. There is a narrative dimension to these action representations; children turn real and hypothetical experiences into stories (see also Duncum, 1993). In addition, their drawing actions vary in response to changes in emotional ambience and mood in interpersonal environment. They also start to differentiate between the different ways the world may be ‘written’ and ‘read’ in two dimensions. The arena of the very young child’s drawing is where we see the beginnings of writing. Hence, even very young children are concerned with the various ways, objects, ideas, events, as well as the sounds people make with their mouths, may be encoded in two dimensions. Evan and his friends may well be at the beginning of this experiment—they may be ‘writing’ their own speech. In this way, drawing becomes a forum for the investigation of many different types of understanding and feelings. (We will consider emergent writing in Chapters 4 and 6.) This evaluation contrasts vividly with the assessment that some of these children are easily distracted and unable to concentrate on the task in hand. This book will show that the child’s apparently disorderly actions are attempts to reflect in drawing the continuous fluctuations within the physical and psychological environment. Chapter 2, then, looks at the beginnings of representation and expression in infancy in the beautifully orchestrated dance of ‘proto-conversation’ between infant and caregiver (Trevarthen, 1995). Here, the infant reveals an interest in the location, shape and movement of objects and events; interests which are later to be reflected in visual and dynamic representations of various kinds. I introduce the idea of the child moving through different levels of dynamic and visual structure, and describe the onset of First Generation Structure. Chapter 3 describes the child moving through First, Second and Third Generation Structure, and how these become ‘templates’ (to use Dennie Wolf’s 1984 term) for drawing actions and other forms of representation. In Chapter 4 we will build upon the neonate conceptual concerns which I describe in Chapter 2. The infant is interested in the identity of objects; and this involves understanding their shape, location and movement. The infant is also fascinated with the structure of action programmes, particularly those of his or her own body. Now, the child uses the drawing surface for three intertwined processes which have a dialectical relationship with each other. The child investigates structure as something of interest in itself, in a process of ‘infrastructural investigation’, to use Derek Bickerton’s term for children’s investigation of language (Bickerton, 1981, p. 234). Children also use a range of visual and dynamic media to represent both the structure of objects and the structure of events. Additionally, the child uses

8

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

the drawing surface as an arena in which to understand how different semiotic systems may be encoded in two dimensions; for example, the child also discovers and experiments with the written word. In Chapter 5 we will consider the importance of play as part of a process through which expressive elements can be investigated as structures in their own right. We will consider how the child controls the trajectories of hand-held objects in manipulative play whilst monitoring visual transformations which they pass through due to changes in position. We will see how the deep patterns of action which guide children’s play are carried over into the area of drawing and painting. As I have mentioned above, research has generally ignored the possibility that drawing may investigate aspects of reality other than the depiction of shape. Chapter 6 is about the child’s representation of both objects and events. I will show the importance of action representation as part of the dialectical relationship between child and medium. Using new research, this chapter will show how the child specifies more about the relationships between and within objects and events. Chapter 7 suggests that descriptions of the shape of objects derive from event scripts—or internally constructed action representation. We will consider how some visual representations capture different sorts of information; some deriving from optical information; some deriving from other forms of understanding which capture the main axes and structure of objects irrespective of particular viewpoint. In this chapter, we will see how children start to specify the ‘transformational’ values of lines and shapes. We will see how spatial relations are mapped onto the drawing surface; and how the child works out the ‘denotational values’ of lines and shapes—that is, what lines and shapes stand for in the world in terms in terms of edges, boundaries, faces and volumes (Willats, 1985, 1997). Chapter 8 looks more closely at a very important phase in childhood, from 3 years to 4 years, and focuses particular attention on one child, my own son, Ben. He is one of those children who draws intensely and virtually everyday during this period. His drawings highlight some general characteristics about the development of visual structure. In this chapter we see the interrelationship of a range of conceptual interests and emotional concerns which are reflected in his drawings, paintings and sculpture. We will also consider how children’s use of visual media is part of the spatiotemporal theatre of symbolic play, in which the child constructs ‘probabilistic futures’ (Partington and Grant, 1984) which involve the thoughts and feelings, intentions and motivations of imagined actors in imagined worlds. Like the visual artwork which they often analogue, these plays are not mere ‘copies’ of an adult reality. Within these hypothesized realities, the child learns about points of view—at many levels of understanding. The child constructs imagined spatial arrays as seen from a range of imagined station-points, and starts to organize these into an overall scheme. It will be shown that some of these understandings are of viewpoint and line-of-sight; whilst others are about the structure of events and the structure of objects. The child also studies and represents transformations, those caused by observer movement, and those caused by changes of position and changes of state. Another understanding formed in representational play is about the psychology of imagined actors in imagined worlds. All of these understandings are coordinated on the drawing surface by some children in elaborate constructions of alternate, hypothetical universes. Using new research, in Chapter 9 we will see how in later childhood the individual starts to formalize the possibilities and constraints of various media, realizing the internal structure of these as systems, tools and processes of thinking. Whereas the younger child, in a self-motivated, self-initiated process of infrastructural investigation struggled to sort out the representational possibilities of various actions and gradually worked out the transformational and denotational values of lines and shapes, the older child reformulates these systems according to new insights afforded by revolutions occurring in cognition. Again focusing on the case study of Ben, in this chapter we will trace how the child starts to reconcile the need to capture the main axes and characteristics of objects and situations, with another desire, that of the encoding of depth and view-specific information. During later childhood and adolescence there occur radical transformations of the sense of self and changes in the individual’s relationship to the world that in some respects cause instability, but which also offers new possibilities. This will be discussed in Chapter 10. Whereas in earlier childhood, the child’s project had been to work out and establish the

CHAOS AND ORDER: THE GENESIS OF EXPRESSIVE AND REPRESENTATIONAL THOUGHT

9

values of lines and shapes and what they actually stood for in the world, the older child and teenager realizes further levels of meaning. The older child realizes the ‘behind the scenes’ symbolism of art and of action (Wolf, 1989). They become ‘readers’ of the world in a new way (Freire, 1972). They appreciate that a description of the formal layout or surface of an artwork may not reveal all its meanings. In Chapter 10, we will again look mainly at the example of Ben, during a period of his adolescence. This particular teenage artist will be used to stand for some aspects of a general process. In some ways his case is unusual: firstly, because he is an unusually gifted draughtsperson; and secondly, his passage from childhood to adolescence is particularly traumatic—he had a brain tumour which nearly killed him. I do not think either of these factors disqualifies his case as representative of a general process. Firstly, whilst talented, the general developmental steps he makes share something with other people. Secondly, whilst his transition from boy to young adult is particularly hazardous, his crisis tells us something about developmental transformation generally. Whilst this is an extreme example, it has something to tell us about the teenager’s life crisis at this time: when old established realities fail; when one’s ‘elders and betters’ are seen to be fragile and fallible; and when the rules are broken. Such works have many levels of meaning, layer upon layer. This in itself is typical of adolescent art generally. Whilst in this young artist’s hands, drawing media becomes an unusually sensitive vehicle for the expression and realization of his thinking and feeling, these images have something to tell us about the development of cognition and representation generally. This young man’s development exemplifies a general process through which some children gradually bring under conscious control the various ways objects, views, words and ideas may be encrypted. Like other people growing up, he differentiates between the various ways text and context interlock. He expands the ways he ‘writes’ and ‘reads’ the world. In earlier childhood, much of this process was inaccess-ible to introspection, but in adolescence it gradually becomes possible for the individual to consciously reflect upon this process of transformation. Art can form an essential instrument in making this possible. In adolescence, art is used to reflect upon art itself. This is part of the process termed metacognition; the ability to think about thinking. In the final chapter, Chapter 11, I will consider some of the pedagogical implications of the book. The book describes a self-generated programme of development in visual and expressive modes, but it will be made clear that this development does require sensitive and enlightened support from the interpersonal and social environment if it is to flourish. In this chapter, I will discuss the optimal conditions required if development in visual and representational thinking is to continue. I will also suggest that these conditions also promote other areas of cognition, normally thought to be unrelated to ‘art’. To put it the other way around; environments which are not conducive to artistic development are likely to have deleterious effects on other areas of intellectual development too. I will suggest that some environments can be downright destructive to intellectual and emotional development. The initiation in recent years of national curricular (curiously similar across different nations) has exacerbated long-running problems about the way knowledge, learning and development are conceptually construed and provided for. As part of this discussion, I will also make some suggestions about the interrelationship between an unfolding programme of development and how this may interact with different cultural settings. The child’s use of visual media forms an important part of that process which enables us to take control of our lives. We will now look at its beginnings in infancy.

Chapter 2 The Four-dimensional Language of Infancy

According to many accounts, both old and new, the beginnings of drawing are supposed to be meaningless, and are categorized pejoratively under the misleading generic term ‘scribbling’. Though some writers attach some importance to ‘scribbling’, in terms of sensorimotor practice and the enjoyment infants might experience, very few have credited any representational or expressive meaning to this phase. Look at Figure 2 (p. 21). Most writers do not see any representational or expressive value in drawings like this. Such drawings are considered lacking in meaningful messages of any kind. They are thought of as meaningless ‘scribbling’, of value only in the sense that they constitute the sensory-motoric practice for the true beginnings of visual representation that is to come. In fact, during the phase when infants are supposed to be mindlessly scribbling, they imbue their marking actions with profound expressive and representational meaning. In drawings like this, the child is using visual medium for four interrelated purposes: for an investigation of visual and dynamic structure in itself; for the representation of shape; for the representation of movement, and for the expression of emotion (Matthews, 1984, 1994a). This is a very different story from many other classical and recent texts on children’s drawing. For example, in a model of development deriving from Piaget, earliest marking actions are thought the chaotic beginnings of a long journey toward unambiguous depiction of three-dimensional objects as seen from a notional station-point in space. Twenty years of research, in London and the Far East, into children’s use of visual media, has taught me that we are seeing an unfolding programme of development in which the child spontaneously generates visual structures, which have expressive and representational meaning right from the outset. These structures form the basis of later visual representation and expression. Children seem to move spontaneously through different levels of visual structure, which I have termed First, Second and Third Generation Structure. These visual and dynamic structures become ‘attractor systems’, which are information seeking structures responsive to certain forms of input from the environment but not others. These attractors drive and shape development, causing the distinctive changes we find emerging in children’s art. The implications this has for education are little understood. Where Do Representational and Expressive Values Come From? The earliest expressive actions come from the psychological space formed between caregiver and infant. In this psychological envelope or ‘bubble’, body actions, especially of the hands, arms and facial muscles, form part of early dialogues or ‘proto-conversations’ (Trevarthen, 1980, 1988) between caregiver and baby. Because these actions issue from the phylogenetically basic regulators of emotion and learning, deep in sub-cortical structures they are imbued with expressive values (Trevarthen, 1995). This means that the infant immediately contributes to culture with actions whose expressive qualities are not learned, they are not the result of a long induction into arbitrary semiotic systems, but are, on the contrary, spontaneous expressions and indices of affect. These expressive actions, emerging at birth, between

THE FOUR-DIMENSIONAL LANGUAGE OF INFANCY

11

caregiver and child, are the substrate upon which later expression and representation is founded. In exquisitely orchestrated interchanges between infant and mother, these actions become emotionally saturated and given meaning. This idea alone has profound implications for the course of representational and expressive development and how we understand it and provide for it. Recent experimental work with neonates has shown that they do not enter the world as blank slates or ‘tabular rasa’ (Bower, 1982; Spelke, 1985). They seem to be born with at least two sets of schemata: one concerned with the shape, location and movement of objects; the other concerned with understanding people. Bower (1982) has shown that newborns, though lacking experience of objects will, if supported so as to facilitate the required movements, reach out for objects, if these are placed in a ‘within-reach’ position. Infants seem to have knowledge about their own field of action. Additionally, as Bower has mentioned, it is not a foregone conclusion that infants should differentiate objects from background and reach toward the object rather than the empty spaces between them, which might conceivably appear as equally interesting coloured patches in the visual field. That they will reach towards discriminable entities, has important consequences upon later representational and expressive thought. Neonates are also very interested in the movement of objects. This interest is indicated by the way in which they exhibit avoidance behaviour (interpolation of hands, closure of eyes) for looming objects (Bower, 1982). Infants also show an interest in other types of flight-paths, those that do not impinge upon their own persons, or enter into their own fields of action. In some interesting experiments by Elizabeth Spelke (1985) in which objects were made to pass, partly hidden, behind screens before the infant, the infant seemed to place greater reliance on the object’s characteristic trajectory than on its colour, texture or form, as a means to identify its unity and coherence. It would seem that identifying an object, its movements, as well as its shape and position, are essential features for the infant. We should therefore not be too surprised that some of the content of early representation revolves around the identity of events and objects and people, and the movement and location of objects. Before we consider these early representations, let us look more closely at this field of action between caregiver and infant that forms the cradle of expressive and representational thought. It is within this psychological space formed between infant and caregiver that objects, and actions performed upon them, take on meaning and emotion. Within this space, actions and objects are introduced in a special way, usually intuitively, by the caregiver. Words and actions, projected by the adult into this zone, are slowed down and voices lightened in pitch. Adult hand and arm movements are carefully decelerated within the infant’s visual field. The infant also contributes to these ‘proto-conversations’ (Trevarthen, 1980, 1995). In an emotional fourdimensional language, facial expressions, sounds, actions of arms and hands of both infant and caregiver are exquisitely orchestrated together (Petitto, 1987; Trevarthen, 1980; Matthews, 1997c). For example, Hannah is only 3 days old and is supported in the lap of her mother, Linda. Linda gently supports Hannah’s head with her hands. Coupled precisely with each phrase, ‘Hello Hannah… How are you?’ Linda inclines her head slightly toward Hannah. Each little burst of action Hannah makes is inserted into the pauses between Linda’s phrases. In response to the first sound of Linda’s voice, plus the synchronized forward inclination of her head, Hannah moves her own head, just fractionally, upward to Linda, and her mouth starts to open widely, expressing expectation and attention. She looks up toward Linda’s face whilst at the same time she raises her right hand, allowing it to hover for a moment, the fingers splaying out. This hand then moves in an anticlockwise, elliptical, exploratory motion before her, at one point brushing her own mouth and finally coming to rest on Linda’s wrist. Each partner tunes into the rhythmic periodicities of the other’s patterned actions, timing his or her own contributions to fit into the interstices of the other’s actions, in an elaborate dance of facial muscles, eyes, arms and hands. Each partner has the capacity to detect, within the actions, facial expressions and vocalizations of the other, subtle indices of intention and motivation (Trevarthen, 1980, 1988). Each partner is examining and analysing the other’s face and actions as guides for the spacing of her own contribution.

12

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Perception of Shape It seems that newborns, when scanning static geometrical patterns or photographs of faces attend to the surrounding contour and fail to detect details inside the closure. It is the closure that is the most important attractor. However, newborns are able to detect visual structures within the animated, living mother’s face, particularly vertices around the eyes, which may have the level of complexity which is interesting to infants and which may comprise the basis of invariant or non-accidental structures in early representation. Driven by sub-cortical structures, self-motivated, intentional actions made towards certain patterned events and objects may give rise to the deep structures of art. The detection of enclosing boundary, and elements within it, will reappear in visual representation at just over 2 years of age. The Beginnings of Action Representation? Notice that in my example observation on pp. 13–14, the first object to be reached and grasped is this special object, another human being. When other objects are shown to the child, these are also carefully inserted into this interpersonal space between caregiver and child. Objects are typically offered to the infant at around the midline of the baby’s chest (Gray, 1978). Linda dangles a multi-coloured plastic cube and swings it slightly back and forth in Hannah’s visual field. Hannah studies it intensely and makes several over arm arcing actions towards it, sometimes striking it. Of especial interest to us is that, whilst Hannah watches the object swing back and forth, she makes arm movements which move in almost perfect synchrony with the pendulum-like movements of the cube. It is as if the infant is emulating the movements of the cube with movements of her own arm. The toy’s motion derives from, and reflects, Linda’s own movements, and we know that infants are very responsive to the patterned, cyclical movements of people (Richards, 1980). It might be that infants’ own impulsive responses to moving objects, especially if the object’s movements are essentially extensions of human movement, form the basis of dynamic representations. The Infant Moves Through Different Levels of Visual Structure First Generation Structure These observations show the emergence of basic actions I have termed First Generation Structures. The most important categories of movement I have named vertical arc, horizontal arc and push pull (Matthews, 1984, 1990, 1994a). First Generation Structures emerge from an undifferentiated group of actions, which are clustered around objects and people. The infant begins to differentiate and exploit these three kinds of actions of the arms that will be of enormous importance in early drawing. The vertical arc The development of this action is linked to the infant’s perception of the object as a target in space. At around 3 months of age, Hannah strikes the wall with her hand, and then studies the palm of her hand. She seems to be sorting out the relationship between the actions of her body and the effects these produce. She may be gaining an understanding that she is the agent who can produce effects and changes in the world. The vertical arc is used as a ubiquitous strategy to test all manners of surfaces and objects. It offers up valuable sensory-cognitive feedback which differs according to the surface with which it impacts, for example a surface of concrete, or a surface of water. Hitting the buttons of a machine, an electronic or mechanical toy, for example, will sometimes initiate chains of events only tenuously linked to

THE FOUR-DIMENSIONAL LANGUAGE OF INFANCY

13

the first action. This latter example is important, as the child will increasingly encounter electronic media. The vertical arc is also developed by the infant as a reach and grasp toward objects, and to express or communicate emotion, in a variety of slappings and bangings. The horizontal arc The vertical arc’s potentialities for contacting objects, for excited responses and signals to people and for outward reach and grasp, develop rapidly over the first and second months. However, the horizontal arc only really starts to develop when the infant can sit up, support his or her own head, and have within-reach access to horizontal surfaces. The capacity of the horizontal arc to scatter objects is one that the child soon exploits for expressive potential. Sometimes it happens that the horizontal arc will collide with an object at the baby’s midline. The infant learns to use the horizontal arc to gather up objects and eventually to retrieve them with the hand. In a series of observations made of Hannah, Joel and Ben at around 3 months of age, we see the children develop both the object scattering and the object-contacting potentialities of the horizontal arc. Later we will see the significance of these two axes of movement, vertical and horizontal arc, in visual representation and drawing. The push pull The last of the trio of mark-making gestures does not appear until the fourth month, as this action requires the child to coordinate schemes of looking, and hand and arm movements, in order to reach and grasp an object. Like the horizontal arc, the push pull requires the child to make a hand and arm action along a flat, usually horizontal plane. The push pull is therefore a more advanced action conceptually. It is not glimpsed in Hannah until about 3 months, when she is learning to push and pull objects around on flat, smooth, horizontal surfaces. Releasing First Generation Structure for Expression and Representation Coupled with the acquisition of skills in looking and handling, the infant develops a quite different psychological orientation to his or her own actions. The infant starts to release these actions from the struggle for mastery, and the constraints of accommodation (Piaget, 1951) to become playful routines; dynamic structures which are sufficiently enjoyable to be repeated by the infant many times. For example, whilst sucking at the breast, Hannah makes rhythmical arm movements and her fingers curl in an exquisite wave motion. Some of these actions are synergistic responses to internal, visceral or muscular sensations; but others will be empathic responses to a perceived movement or an event occurring outside one’s own body; the event perhaps of another’s actions. This empathic response will form the substructure for cross-modal associations between sensory domains. These cross modal associations will themselves become the basis for a representational and aesthetic dimension of performance and actions. As skills in handling and viewing objects develop, so the range and depth of playful interactions with the object increases. In play the infant is able to separate out means from ends and investigate the kinematic chains of action as structures intrinsically interesting in themselves. For example, the infant rotates his or her own hand in front of his or her face in order to view its visual transformation; an object may be rotated in both hands, while the infant, quietly, studiously, visually surveys its continuously changing aspects. Colwyn Trevarthen has shown that the infant does not merely learn these strategies of handling and viewing objects from imitation of the caregiver. The infant plays a part in the ‘creation of culture’ (Trevarthen and Grant, 1979, p. 566). The infant and caregiver share experiences of play, which often centre on toys or objects that become invested with emotionally powerful qualities. In the first chapter we saw some children forming the conception of taking a view of an object. Trevarthen’s studies show that the understanding of

14

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 1

objects and the ability to manipulate them and look at them is a consequence rather than a cause of the relationship formed between caregiver and infant (Trevarthen, 1975). Expressive Play Between Caregiver and Infant Some kinds of play between adult and infant will provide background experiences for visual representation. For example, the infant learns a great deal about lines-of-sight, viewpoint and occlusion in play with the parent or caregiver. Here is an example of such a play, in which 6 month old Keira plays a ‘Peepo’ game with her father, Joel, who uses a cushion to support her body in a near sitting position on the settee next to him. She holds a purple balloon up close to her face, using both hands, each palm pressed to left or right side of the balloon. Joel also holds on to the balloon, helping maintain it in this position. He hides his head behind the other side of the balloon, saying ‘Keira’. This is a game she knows. She looks up at the top of the balloon in expectation of his appearing there. Then Joel pulls the balloon longitudinally away from her and slightly downwards, and looks over the top, saying ‘Peepo!’. As the balloon is pulled away from her, Keira momentarily tracks its recession, but then she quickly inclines her head upward and sees him, looming over the top of the balloon. She smiles widely. He does it a second time. Already, by the second time, she is quite excited and is actively assisting in hiding herself behind the balloon, not merely allowing herself to be hidden, but pulling the balloon toward herself. She moans softly against the balloon, pressing her open mouth up against it, with Joel on the other side. She raises her eye gaze up to the top of the balloon in expectation of his appearing there. She kicks her feet and gives a little gurgling shriek when she is hidden for the third time, her excitement mounting. He appears over the top of the balloon again, saying, ‘Peepo!’. She looks up at him and opens her mouth in a big smile, her eyes widening. By the fourth time, she kicks her legs in excitement as she hides behind the balloon. During the fifth, sixth and seventh time, she is panting, kicking her feet excitedly and she makes increasingly louder gurgles of laughter as she awaits Joel’s reappearance (Figure 1). In this play, we can see the transformation of earlier interaction between infant and caregiver. Shared perceptions of carefully calibrated events; interpersonal detection and analysis of cues of intention and motivation; visual tracking behaviours; interpolation and prediction of trajectories, object manipulation and vocalization have all been unified in a complex and sophisticated play involving, occlusion, line-of-sight and viewpoint. These have all been coordinated into a patterned sequence in which both partners share an understanding of timing as a means to build up suspense, excitement and happiness. Keira anticipates what Joel is going to do. She readies herself for the game. She assists Joel in moving the balloon to the correct position. She seems to display an understanding of the timing involved. When there is a pause in the game and Joel starts to talk to me, moving the balloon slightly away from her to the side, she grasps the balloon with her palms on each side, and pulls it back into position. Not only does she help hold the balloon in place, preparing for excitement of the revelation, she also shows a more subtle indication of her understanding of the game. At that moment when the

THE FOUR-DIMENSIONAL LANGUAGE OF INFANCY

15

balloon completely obstructs her view of Joel’s face, she also averts her eye gaze downward, pressing her face into the balloon, preparing herself for the surprise of seeing his face. She actively helps structure the game; engaging in building up the suspense. Joel plays a game that exploits, and pushes to the edge, Keira’s tolerance for fear. He can do this because they have been able to intuitively transfer motivations and emotions since her birth. Conclusion In this chapter I have suggested that the basis for the expression of emotion and the representation of objects and events form within an interpersonal arena between caregiver and infant. In this psychological space each partner is able to engage in deep states of empathic understanding with the other (Trevarthen, 1980, 1995). The calibration of exploratory and expressive actions, their stress, intensity, duration and power are almost certainly the result of emotional patterning. Emotions are intimately involved in acts of perception and cognition; in object manipulation, tool-use and exploration. Investigative impulses sent from the infant’s brain are constrained by emotions generated from subcortical structures that organize actions into patterned bursts (Trevarthen, 1995). Skills in viewing, handling and visually tracking objects, plus the expressive and representational possibilities these might have, are acquired within the interpersonal relationship between infant and caregiver. Initially, natural patterns of action impelled from the infant take the form of empty-handed gestures, which collide, strike or slap surfaces, but these actions are later applied to visual media of many kinds. The infant may first of all be motivated by abstract concerns about the identity of objects; their movement, location and shape; later this interest is translated into concrete strategies. The fourdimensional language of infancy may already contain the elements of later expressive and representational forms. Some actions contain ‘messages’ which are not representational but are the result of the infant detecting and exploiting the expressive characteristics in his or her own body (Trevarthen, 1995). We must, of course, be cautious in how exactly we conceive these interactions as forerunners to later expressive and representational behaviours. Each particular expressive and representational medium will require its own mediumspecific skills. Nevertheless, these action-quanta form a prelude to early drawing and other representational actions in the sense that they create a psychological orientation toward events, objects and processes, which will allow basic expressive and representational actions to emerge. In the next chapter, I will describe the onset of the next generations of visual structure and how these are applied to expressive media. Throughout the book we will see how development is an interaction between pattern of actions unfolding from within the child and what is available in the environment. This selection is guided by powerful attractor systems that are generated from within but which require a special kind of support from adult companions.

Chapter 3 Meaningful Marks: The Beginnings of Drawing

During the phase when infants are supposed to be mindlessly scribbling, they imbue their marking actions with profound expressive and representational intention. The so called ‘scribble’ in Figure 2 is a serious investigation of visual structure, already loaded with emotion. Virtually all accounts of drawing lump together, under the generic title ‘scribbling’, a vast range of different types of drawing, and each one worthy of serious consideration. For many children, these drawings are products of a systematic investigation, rather than haphazard actions, of the expressive and representational potential of visual media. This is a very different story from many other texts, both classical and recent, on children’s drawing. For example, from a model of development deriving from Piaget (which I will describe on pp. 84–6), many people have inherited the idea that earliest marking actions are meaningless, and remain so for a couple of years or so until the day arrives when the child spots accidental or ‘fortuitous’ likenesses appearing in the drawing. Rhoda Kellogg (1969) offers a variation of this kind of story, writing that scribbling is important, but only insofar as it accidentally provides a pool of shapes from which the child can, at a later date, form designs, aggregates, patterns and the first pictures. In this, and similar accounts, the idea is that children discern, in their ‘scribbles’ shapes which are initially the product of accident, and then purposely try to reproduce them. Aside from the anomaly of the child strangely persisting in an activity he or she finds meaningless (a notion totally at variance with all other aspects of cognitive and affective development), I have never throughout hundreds of observations seen children trying to reproduce shapes which are initially the product of accident. Maureen Cox (1992) makes the same point. Neither accident, nor the purposeful exploitation of accident, seems to be major mechanisms of development. Researchers often hold unconscious assumptions about what constitutes drawing. It is largely Piaget’s theory (though there are other influences) which has caused people to think of drawing solely in terms of a problem-solving process through which children construct a rationalistic, ‘realistic’ depiction of objects in space. This process is supposed to move from primitive and inferior early modes, starting from activities which are essentially mindless, to pictures which —though recognizable—are considered the clumsy beginnings of a long apprenticeship toward ‘correct’ representation (Wolf and Fucigna, 1983). This particular approach to the development of representation derives from a certain reading of a surprisingly small number of types of drawing. Two important landmarks in this developmental landscape are the ‘tadpole’ figure, and the ‘conventional’ figure. Drawings that approximate to these classifications can be seen in Figures 19 and 20 (p. 40) respectively. The ‘tadpole’ figure (Figure 19) is a human figure represented as a single, roughly circular closed shape with two roughly parallel lines attached to its underside for legs. A development of the tadpole is formed when two lines are attached, one each side of the closed shape, to represent arms. The tadpole drawing, more than any other, is supposed to separate the supposed chaos that precedes it from the supposed ordered representation, which is to come. The ‘conventional’ figure is further along the trail. This figure consists of two closed shapes attached to each other in vertical alignment (Figure 20). The top closure is usually slightly smaller than the one below, the higher closure representing a head; the lower, the body. Two parallel vertical lines are attached to the lower closure, representing

MEANINGFUL MARKS: THE BEGINNINGS OF DRAWING

17

legs. Two lines representing arms are usually abutted to the side of the body unit, though in some early versions, these may be attached to the head unit. This ‘conventional’ figure is usually presumed to be an improvement on the tadpole and is supposed to represent the child’s increasing awareness of how a human body ‘really’ looks. No one seems to have seriously questioned exactly whose this ‘convention’ is. Many critics have taken Piaget to task over his interpretation of children’s drawing and perceptual skills. For example, there has been criticism of his ideas about children’s understanding and representation of the perceived shapes of scenes and objects from particular viewpoints, or station-points. Nevertheless, most of these writers do not fundamentally disagree with Piaget’s main tenet, that the road on which children travel is toward the depiction of objects as if seen from a fixed station-point. One notion that holds together this classical story of drawing development stems from Piaget’s idea that initially, the child reduces all volumetric solids and closures to undifferentiated closed shapes, regardless of their specific and peculiar contour characteristics. Hence, the tadpole may be explained in terms of the child collapsing head and body into one undifferentiated closure. But supposing children are able to differentiate between different shaped closures and volumes in their drawings in very early childhood, even before they produce tadpoles? This would dispose of the landmarks, and perhaps with it would vanish the entire landscape. Another flaw with this theory is that children produce all sorts of human figures and representations of objects, in addition to, or instead of the tadpole. Some children do not draw the tadpole or the conventional figure at all. This evidence, together with the suggestion from recent experiments (Matthews, 1997b), that children are able to differentiate between differently contoured volumes and show this differentiation in drawing, presents a different story of development. There is no real ‘picture’, in Figure 2 (p. 21), in the normal sense of the word, nor are there in many, if any, of the first drawings produced by very young children. Does this mean that these drawings are without meaning? Only if one assumes that drawing is necessarily about the depiction of objects. I will show that the representation of the observable shape of the object from a particular station-point is only one aspect of children’s drawing, and indeed, of art as a whole. Additionally, the child has other representational concerns too, which are not to do with observable shape at all. The child is also interested in the representation of movement (Athey, 1990; Wolf and Fucigna, 1983; Matthews, 1984, 1990, 1994a). Also, children use their own body actions, and actions performed upon visual media, to express emotion. In the hands of a 1—or 2-year-old, drawing and painting become sensitive media, responsive to even minute fluctuations in the child’s own feelings and in the ambient emotional temperature. When representational values appear in children’s drawing these are unrecognizable to those who assume visual representation is about recognizable pictures of recognizable things. Some early paintings and drawings are not pictures of things, but they are representations in a fuller sense, in that they record the child’s process of attention to objects and events. Far from being meaningless, the early paintings and drawings are products of a complex or family of representational and expressive modes. First Marks It is inevitable that at some point in the infant’s investigation of the effect of his or her actions on the environment, that the infant comes to perform these actions on materials which leave traces. For example, Joel, 6 months of age, regurgitates some milk onto a purple carpet in front of him within his visual field. He looks at this and reaches into this white target, which is contrasted against the purple ground, and then scratches at its edges with his fingernails. He looks very carefully at the actions of his fingers as they disturb and transform the edges of the patch of milk. I have described how the infant gradually differentiates and combines reaching and grasping actions. By 6 months, Joel has succeeded in grasping a wide range of objects. Joel’s investigation of his regurgitated milk is really a derivation of reach and grasp. It is part of an investigation of many kinds of discriminated unit within his visual field. This little pool of white presents a very contrasted unit against its surrounding ground, the purple carpet. Perhaps because both it

18

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

and his hands are present within his visual field he is prompted to touch it, and perhaps initially to grasp it. Finding it impossible to grasp, he modifies his actions to a scratching motion that causes transformations within his visual field. First Generation Structure

Figure 2

Figure 3

Horizontal Arc At 13 months, by pressing his palms in spilt milk and fanning his arms in two horizontal arcs against the floor of the kitchen, Joel describes two, interlocked segments of an arc (Matthews, 1990, 1994a). We can see this marking gesture emerge at around 1 year but children of 4 or 5 years of age may still be observed using it. Three weeks later, Joel is making the same kind of action but now it is extended by tool-use. On the floor of my painting studio, he uses a brush and orange paint to make a horizontal arcing stroke which three weeks earlier he had been making with the palms of his hands in milk. This is an instance of a natural action being ‘culturally amplified’ (Bruner, 1964) by the technologies of image making (see Figure 2, p. 21).

MEANINGFUL MARKS: THE BEGINNINGS OF DRAWING

19

Vertical Arc The vertical arc also makes contact with mark-making materials. The powerful over arm arc is slapped down into any attractive target of spilt milk or food. At around 1 year of age, when armed with a marking instrument of some kind, this vertical arc results in dots, blobs or spots (see Figure 2, p. 21). Push Pull From 6 months, Hannah uses the push pull action in spilled milk on shiny floor tiles. Again, this action derives from an action performed upon handheld objects and is now applied to making materials (see Figure 3). The trace-making effects of actions in pigment have extraordinary power for infants. With all of these First Generation Structures, a visible record remains, on a surface, of actions which up to now have been invisible. At around this time, some infants also notice the interesting effects caused by dashing certain special objects against surfaces. These objects are mark-making instruments of various kinds. They leave marks and traces in their wake as they travel along surfaces, the ‘trace-making’ effects described by Michotte (1963, p. 289). The infant looks carefully at the points of these instruments (pens, pencils, crayons, etc.). He or she soon ascertains which orientation and movements of the marker relative to the mark receiving surface are required if the effect is to take place. The child experiments with various actions and relationships of marker to surface, noting when the marks appear and when they fail to appear. As we have seen, these actions derive from expressive, empty handed gestures, and all-purpose strategies for testing, contacting or discarding objects. Even when children have developed a range of new handling and marking actions, these early actions are not abandoned. They are still used as reliable fallback strategies when all else fails, for example; when encountering new materials. In Chapter 5, I will describe how children deploy these First Generation actions when they encounter the very different medium of electronic paint. (Even adults will revert to these actions, in testing new marking tools for the first time, whether these are traditional markers or the mouse driven computer.) As other strategies supersede them in terms of efficiency, so they become released, to a large extent, from functional purposes and become of interest in themselves as expressive vehicles. First Generation drawing strategies (horizontal arcs, push pulls, and vertical arcs) are used for compositional elements; patches are sometimes used to comment on distal and proximal relations. Horizontal arcs and push pulls are often opened up to form jagged, elongated shapes. The Development of First Generation Structure The infant is also responsive to the shape of the target too. Early drawings are interplays between actions impelled irresistibly to external targets and the infant’s subtle responses to the perceived qualities and features of those targets, and to the ensuing changes caused by the actions. Of course, the child does not encounter visual media on his or her own, but within a social and cultural context. The child enters domains of media use which are constructed, physically and conceptually, by adults. Even a blank sheet of paper is a product of a particular theory about space. Certain social situations and cues may be signalled to the child in subtle ways. How the child encounters visual media and the ways in which adults conceptualize these media is crucial to development. We will now look in slightly more detail at two observations of early painting episodes, because these show the interaction between natural actions impelled from within the child, and the physical and social environment in which they occur. Ben, at 1 year 9 months, is painting in my studio. Already armed with horizontal arc strategies which have been performed on sheets of drawing paper, he now sits on the floor of my studio, painting all around his body, creating a near circle, with his oscillating hips as the hub of the rotation. Later, with a black loaded brush, he paints horizontal arcs on the window, whilst simultaneously, with his other hand, opening and closing the window, a movement which by definition follows an arcing motion echoing his painting. He may perceive that these actions are allowable in this

20

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

particular setting. There is paint on the floor, for I have been deeply involved in painting for years, and Colwyn Trevarthen notes that babies might ‘…appreciate the traces of other persons’ handwork. Visible works of handcraft carry messages about the movement of creation and about the feelings of seeing an artefact being made’ (Trevarthen, 1995, p. 169). The arcing motions made by Ben in this observation are from a family of actions that exhibit certain generalizable characteristics. However, each type of action is modified according to different media and contextual demands, and what we might call cues or ‘suggestions’ from the physical and psychological environment. Another interesting example is when Joel, in my studio at 14 months, waves a paint brush in horizontal arcs. He causes droplets to fly around in a beautiful arc, according to centrifugal or inertial forces; and when he stabs the brush against the empty air, in a vigorous up and downward over-arm arc, inertial force causes droplets of paint to splatter onto the floor. In the first condition, a line of spots is made; in the second condition, a cluster of spots. In both situations he carefully visually tracks the effects he makes. He also visually monitors the large horizontal arc he makes on the floor, with a brush. He knows he is allowed here to use the brush and paint in this way; he does not have to strike a piece of paper, the floor is a painting surface. It is possible that he is guided and encouraged by the paint-marks on the floor, as Ben at 1 year 9 months had been. Unlike other horizontal arcs which are adapted to the confines of the painting surface, minimized in scale and accelerated in tempo, this special surface, the paint-splattered floor, prompts a very extensive extended arc, his arm moving at fullest reach. Deeper analysis reveals the intentions and motivations behind his changing positions. When he is crouching on the floor to make the fanning movement in empty air, he may feel unsteady and he may feel the need to rise to become more sure-footed. It may be that this new position induces his following action, for he stabs the paint brush up and down in the empty air, causing droplets to fly off onto the floor. Alternatively, the making of one type of action may suggest, or even require, an ensuing contrasting one, in a way akin to the structural necessities of a verbal conversation (Chafe, 1994). We will see other instances later on, where drawing and painting episodes seem to echo conversational structures. If this is the case, he feels the need to make the second marking action at some point during the making of the first, and he stands up in order to do so. Like observations of other children, this example shows a child planning ahead and adapting actions in order to fulfil certain ideas he has in mind. Alternatively, certain patterns of actions have an internal structure, including entrance and exit points, which the child feels must be completed. Even in early infancy, we are already looking at intentional action, with the child selecting from a range of actions for expressive purposes. Infants sometimes intentionally randomize their actions, but this is different from saying the drawings themselves are random. Joel’s and Ben’s painting actions are not haphazard. They are experts in these actions, and are quite ready to use them in new situations or with new media. There is variation in their marking actions but these are within the general characteristics of the types of marking actions. Of course, the contexts for the beginning of visual representation vary widely, in painting episodes performed around the world. However, whether painted with a big brush on the floor of an artist’s studio, or in a little note-pad, with a crayon, in a small flat in Singapore, I would expect certain familiar characteristics about the way the episode is organized in time and space. We go on to see how these actions are synthesized to form more complex structures. Early Visual Structures Although many discrete actions of the earliest drawing may result in superimpositions of lines, Nancy Smith (1983) is right to say that at this level the child is not concerned with shape, as such, but with actions and their trace-making effects. Very soon however, the angularity of crossing push pull and horizontal arc affords a very striking configuration, and now we can start analysing in terms of shape (see Figure 10, p. 34). Children aim further marking at these angles they

MEANINGFUL MARKS: THE BEGINNINGS OF DRAWING

21

create. The vertical arc makes clusters and aggregates of marks. Here, children are beginning to demarcate the beginnings and ends of lines (see Figure 5). Action Programmes The action of combining two initially separate programmes or objects together is a differentiation that will later assume structural, representational and expressive importance. I will term these combinations of action, action programmes. The infant starts to combine different types of drawing action into rhythmic periodicities, countering, or balancing, as it were, one type of action with another. For example, rapid horizontal arcing gestures may be followed by push pulling gestures, or by vertical arcing, stabbing movements. Piaget is correct when he writes that shape is the result of action. Children seem to find these conjunctions of actions, and their resultant effects, interesting and worth repeating. This exciting visual feedback causes the children to increase the variations of their marking actions in order to achieve further contrasting effects. Other rhythmic action programmes consist of prolonged linear arcing quickly followed by staccato bursts of vertical stabbing. This results in dramatic contrasts between lines and blobs. It is important to see that the basis of these visual contrasts is in contrasts made between actions. These are sequences of movement in which the child compares or contrasts against each other actions of different characteristics. The action programmes become patterned sequences that have internal structure, entrance and exit points. First Drawings of Young Children Reflect a Range of Influence Far from being homogenous ‘scribbling’, children’s early drawing is responsive to a range of influence which is reflected in the characteristics of the marks and shapes produced. The type and quality of child-care will affect the quality of the drawing. One example is from the work of Elsbeth Court, who studied very young children in homesteads in Kenya, who had not encountered drawing materials before. She found that variations in expressive, aesthetic and structure of their first drawings reflected the kind and quality of the child-care they received (Court, 1987). There are also differences, in early drawing, from individual to individual. Susan Somerville (1983) notes stylistic differences in drawings of children between 5 and 7 years. It is also possible to detect differences in the styles of drawing and expressive play, of younger children, between 2 and 4 years of age. In my experience, a 3-year-old will usually distinguish his or her own First Generation drawing from many others in a classroom. Second Generation Structure The process of synthesis and differentiation continues. The child learns to separate and recombine drawing actions in a variety of ways. From this, Second Generation Structure emerges. These are: continuous rotation, demarcated line-endings, travelling zigzags, continuous lines and seriated displacements in time and space.

22

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 4

Figure 5

Straight-line courses appear, in which the marking instrument is pushed or pulled across the paper. Straight-line courses are also performed in three dimensions of space, plus the dimension of time. In most environments there are constraints upon the extent of movement in a straight line. This might be one of the factors which encourages the development of the continuous rotation. This is performed with the entire body in space, or with movements of the hands and arms along prolonged, elliptical circuits. Continuous Rotation Straight line courses are often constrained by the confines of the drawing surface too. This constraint may impel the discovery of a continuous rotational movement in two dimensions. Horizontal arcs and push pulls become more varied by adapting the to-and-fro movements of the hand and arm to a more elliptical movement, so that the original twodirectional axes of these early mark-making gestures is transformed into a more circular trajectory. In this way the continuous rotation emerges. Continuous rotations, in both two and three dimensions, may be performed as structures interesting in themselves, without representational values, or else they are used to represent trajectories of objects. This rotational shape may lead to the discovery of the closed shape. We will return to the closed shape later.

MEANINGFUL MARKS: THE BEGINNINGS OF DRAWING

23

Lines Right-angular structure also becomes more prominent. Lines are attached to each other at approximate right angles. This is a very clear way with which to differentiate forms and this may be the reason children continue to use this as a structural principle as they grow older. Moving Points As well as thinking about the continuous line or moving point, the child thinks about the individual point in space. Sometimes, a discontinuous line of dancing dots on paper is reiterated in representational play with hopping games. Another way this manifests itself in four-dimensional space time is in a variation of the vertical arcing action we see in painting and drawing, when hand-held toy figures are stepped along tap, tap, tapping paths, as the child describes the footfalls of imagined people in imagined worlds. In addition to series of points which follow a linear course, the child also at this time forms groups of dots and blobs, by rhythmical and discrete marking actions clustered around a particular locale. An important contrast is afforded by associating clusters of blobs, or spots with lines. Aggregates of dots or blobs are formed, and sometimes glancing actions produce little dashes. These latter shapes will later become seriated dashes or lines. Travelling waves and travelling zigzags also start to appear, as push pull actions are laterally translated. We can see the beginnings of travelling zigzags in Figure 5 (p. 25), and more developed versions in Figure 15 (p. 38). A travelling ‘e’ shape is another variation. Demarcated Line Endings Beginnings and ends of lines are also noted by the child, and often demarcated by aiming a mark or a spot at one or both ends of a line. As drawing actions become more complex, so variations are also echoed in other forms of action made in the physical environment, sometimes involving the whole body in combinations of hopping, jumping, twirling, and running in straight and curving lines. Expressive and potentially representational actions paraphrase or analogue each other across media domains and contexts. Children during this phase are separating their lines and marks out into different groups; they are starting to classify actions and their effects. Restricting marking actions to a rectangular piece of paper is not necessarily a limitation, for the infant becomes sensitive to the possibilities of this drawing surface. The corners and edges of the paper themselves afford guides to marking actions. The corners are attractive landmarks for drawing, and children will aim their markers at these, rather as they are attracted to angular shapes in general. Drawing at this level consists of push pulls, vertical arcs and a highly varied rotational movement that is allowed to transform into a multi-directional line. Third Generation Structure The entire family of First and Second Generation mark-making gestures are organized together and undergo transformation. The child discovers structural principles which produce Third Generation Structure of, closure, inside/ outside relations, core and radial, parallelism, collinearity, angular attachments, right-angular structures, and U shapes on baseline. Further elaboration of structural principles generates whole new families of hybrid forms.

24

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 6

Sometimes, dots or blobs are placed inside an empty space which has been left in the centre of a rotational shape. This signals the encoding of inside and outside relations. Later this will become very explicit and purposeful, when the child uses a closed shape, plus internal and external nuclei, to specify inside and outside relations. Beginnings and ends of lines continue to be noted by the child, and are often demarcated by aiming a mark or a spot at one or both ends of a line. Dots are clustered together or run in chains and trails; markings become targets for further vigorous aimed stabbings of the pen. Patches of pigment, intensely applied by push pulling or arcing gestures are super-imposed over each other or placed next to each other. Right-angular structures are more consciously formed, with the intention of attaching or connecting lines one to another at contrasting angles. Lines are run alongside each other, forming the beginnings of parallelism. That some passages of movement run in the same direction, affording

Figure 7

MEANINGFUL MARKS: THE BEGINNINGS OF DRAWING

25

Figure 8

Figure 9

parallel lines with highly salient passages between them, is noted by the child. Another important structure is collinearity, when two or more drawing actions share the same path, as when a series of dots is bisected or connected by a line. In general, Third Generation Structure increasingly utilizes linear structure. All these structures are produced by Ben between 2 years 6 months and 3 years 3 months. Closed Shape Another significant structure occurs when children can choose to restrict a rotational action to a single elliptical, or near circular sweep of pen or brush. This is the closed shape. The closed shape offers powerful representational possibilities for children because it structures space in a new way, separating inside from outside. The closed shape will be used to encode topological relationships, inside and outside, boundary, closure and hollowness. The linear separation of inside and outside means that the line is increasingly seen as representing a surface (Smith et al., 1997). We can see the start of this in drawings by Ben at 2 years 2 months and in those by Hannah at 2 years 5 months. It will also be used to encode both the faces of objects and, somewhat differently, volumetric solids in their entirety. Sometimes, there is no clear way of knowing whether the child is capturing the face of an object, or intends the boundary line to represent the volumetric entirety of the object (Willats, 1997). Piaget argues that very young children represent all closures (and presumably volumes) as undifferentiated closed shapes, regardless of the specific properties of each shape (Piaget and Inhelder, 1956). This would mean that children represent many differently contoured forms and shapes, including straight-sided and curved, and all kinds of polygons, as undifferentiated, roughly circular closed shapes or undifferentiated rotational markings. However, though it does seem that in certain situations children will preserve the topological continuity of line at the expense of other attributes or

26

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

features of shape, this is by no means always so. My experiments show that even 2-year-olds make some attempt to show the difference between a solid sausage-shaped form and a solid sphere placed before them (Matthews, 1997b) (see Figures 26 and 27 on p. 45). Some of the children did this by a variations made in push pull, horizontal arcs or rotational drawing. While it is unusual for very young children to spontaneously draw from observation of objects, it is clear that children, in their spontaneous drawing, systematically vary the dimensions, and shapes of closures, because such investigation is pleasurable in itself. Changes in mood will also result in modifications to the shape of closures and other shapes. Our inherited legend of drawing development disallows 2-year-olds this ability. The unchecked assumption that children have problems differentiating and combining shape has been used to support a supposed progression from ‘scribbling’, to single closure ‘tadpole’ figure, to ‘conventional’ figure. In contrast to the familiar story of children’s development in drawing, very young children are capable of an astonishing differentiation and synthesis of forms during the so-called ‘scribbling’ phase. For example, three or more unit constructions are made, and three-unit human figures occasionally occur. Does Drawing Development Require Early Mark-making Practice? Some writers have challenged the importance of a ‘scribbling’ as a preliminary experience for drawing (Alland, 1983). For example, some people are fond of saying that the phenomenon of those few autistic child artists who possess unusual drawing abilities, completely overthrows developmental theory, claiming that these children do not pass through a forerunning scribbling period (Selfe, 1977). In fact, this turns out to be untrue. As I have commented elsewhere (Matthews, 1994a) it is a great shame that a true record of the earliest drawings of these and other child artists is rarely made; that researchers only start becoming interested when the children start to produce recognizable drawings of objects and scenes. Much would be learnt about development if we had records of the drawings that preceded these children’s configurations. Additionally, other aspects of sensory-motor intelligence parallel ‘scribbling’ experiences. These forms of drawing may not necessarily result in a mark. Scribbling may also be analogued, if not in two dimensions then in other modes; dance and movement for example. Actions made by infants in three dimensions of space have been observed which act as a non-marking type of drawing. Conclusion In this chapter I have described how, before the advent of speech, and during the phase when they are supposed to be mindlessly ‘scribbling’, many children form in visual media a powerful expressive and communicative language. I have identified and described different levels of visual and dynamic structure through which the child moves. Structures appearing on the drawing surface become attractors that guide the child’s search of the visual and kinaesthetic environment and alert him or her to the presence of related forms. One way this occurs is the mutually reciprocal relationship between the performance of these structures in two and three dimensions, plus the dimension of time. It is true that an interest in the action trace of pigment on a surface is shared by other mammals too (see, for example, Busch and Silver, 1994, for some beautiful photographs of cats painting!). However, as important as the sensory-motoric aspect of these actions is, for the human infant there is a deeper level of significance to them (Matthews, 1996a). The young infant’s drawing and painting is an excellent illustration of a stunning process; that of the development of articulated tool-use serving the expression of emotion and the representation of objects and events. Early drawing, like later drawing, and the drawing of adult artists, is not primarily a problem-solving situation, nor is it tied to the representation of the observable shape of objects. Drawing and emergent representation as a whole are

MEANINGFUL MARKS: THE BEGINNINGS OF DRAWING

27

concerned with the children’s search for their own identities as well as the identities and structures of events and objects.

Chapter 4 Actions and Shapes

As we have seen in the last chapter, certain unquestioned assumptions about what constitutes visual representation have effectively masked the range of uses to which the child puts visual media. Some approaches to the development of visual representation are based on the notion that representation must, of necessity, record the recognizable shape of an object as if seen from a notional position in space. In this chapter I will show that not only do children use visual media to represent the structure and shape of objects, they also use these to represent the structure and shape of events. Additionally, they investigate visual structure as of interest in itself. This structural investigation is a continuously unfolding dialectical relationship between the child, the medium, and the external world. This is a journey through an epigenetic landscape in which new vistas of possibilities open up at every turning. That children should represent the movement of objects as well as their shape should not surprise us too much. I noted above that studies of infancy show that the infant is interested in the location and trajectory of objects, perhaps more than their shapes and colour, as a means to identifying their unity (Spelke, 1985). We would expect these concerns to be reflected in their early representation. Children’s visual representation (and I would further claim, all visual representation) ultimately revolves around issues which are of profound concern to all human beings, and these are the identity, location and movement of entities. Encoding the shape of objects is only a part of a larger project concerned with identifying what things are, where things are, and where they go. Shape Representation and Action Representation The child forms a quantum of representational modes that interact together, but for now we will concern ourselves with just two main ones, shape (configurative) and action (dynamic) representation. We saw the interaction between these two modes in the first chapter. Some of the children were drawing the shape of the objects set before them; but other children used a mode of drawing that was utterly different. An example of this was Evan’s and Aaron’s ‘fire’. These children were representing the event of the fire; its dynamic actions, its sounds, and its other effects, together with the related actions of imagined actors involved with the fire. ‘Fire’ is a theme that frequently occurs in play and representation. It may have many levels of meaning for the child. We can see the start of action representation in very early infancy, in the patterned play between infant and caregiver. Some of these are plays of action and sound and are now transferred by the infant to objects that do not speak. Gradually, more complex action patterns, processes and procedures are incorporated into the dance between child and adult companion. When drawing and painting media are encountered, the infant detects the expressive characteristics in painting and drawing actions and the shapes that are produced. Additionally, the child associates sound effects, vocalizations, and movements of other parts of the body, with painting and drawing actions to make up a complex, sensory-modal event.

ACTIONS AND SHAPES

29

Hannah at 2 years and 2 months develops a painting episode into a dance-like movement of the stabbing brush, each impact of the brush, loaded with red paint, synchronized in one-to-one correspondence with a ‘raspberry’ or farting sound. During this event, her mother, Linda, sits next to her within touching distance and her mouth opens into a broad smile of appreciation and understanding. Then, with a brush now loaded with blue paint, Hannah makes a quite different brush stroke; a trailing stroke, which describes a rotational course around a paint pot, resting on the painting surface. Whereas she associated a raspberry sound to the impact of the red-loaded brush, whilst making the trailing blue stroke she makes a very different vocalization, a ‘shhhhhhhh’-ing sound (Matthews, 1994a). In much the same way as earlier on, Hannah associated vocalizations with some of her other physical actions, she now synchronizes vocalizations to her drawing actions. It is especially significant that she associates together vocalizations which share characteristics with the type of painting actions she makes; in this case, staccato ‘raspberry’ sounds with the stab of a red-loaded brush; a gentle ‘shhhh’-ing refrain with the trailing blue line. Part of the understandings forming here are mathematical in character; the child tagging an action (and an appearing mark) with an arbitrary numeron (Gelman and Gallistel, 1983). However, the child’s vocalizations do not merely ‘fit’ the actions in a numerical correspondence, they also analogue them in an expressive and representational sense. This is to say the child makes oneto-one correspondences between different actions of the body, which emphasize, underscore and reiterate each other. The child detects and brings together expressive characteristics in action, mark and vocalization which remain essentially similar across sensory and communicative channels. These are fused together initially, and the child learns to differentiate them and combine them intentionally. When infants associate sounds and gestures and marking action in this way, it is an expressive act but it is also signals a representational possibility, in that the sounds may analogue or represent an action. Humour is present too. Humour depends on intellectual understanding and associations, and the witty meaning is signalled by changes in rhythm, of plays with congruence and incongruity (Athey, 1977, 1990; Reddy, 1991). This is especially true of a painting episode that occurs the following day. Whilst Hannah, with her outstretched right arm, fans a felt-tip pen to and fro in expansive horizontal arcs, she sings, ‘Ba ba ba ba’ in an approximate one-to-one correspondence, with the side-to-side movement of the pen. Then she stops, with the pen poised, just above her right shoulder, her head and body stilled. She is waiting for me to join in. I repeat back to her an imitation of her vocalization, saying, ‘Ba ba ba ba!’ Analysis of a slow-motion video-recording of this observation shows the commencement of her smile as her hand goes down again to make three horizontal arcs, almost perfectly continuing the tempo set by my rhythmically spaced vocals. Emergent Writing Hannah may be representing the sound or analoguing it; she may be ‘writing’ the sounds. If this is the case we could interpret this as emergent writing. Perhaps supporting this interpretation is that, analysis of a slow-motion video-recording reveals that the to-ing and fro-ing of the arm mirrors almost precisely the opening and closing of the mouth. The duration or ‘length’ of each ‘baaa’ is very close to the length and duration of the horizontal arc. In Chapter 6, we will consider how written forms, letters, words and numbers, emerge on the drawing surface. This has been called developmental or emergent writing. It is worth noting that this very complex and symbolically rich act is embedded in one of the earliest marking actions, the horizontal arc. As children mature, these actions are not abandoned but are nested more deeply within a family of expressive action quanta, acquiring more complex meanings. So far, we have considered the child’s investigations of line, shape, position and location. We have noted that these investigations are systematic rather than random. The apparent random nature of children’s early mark-making has been vastly overemphasized. Random drawing actions and actions caused by lack of control of course occur, but no more than we would expect in any other aspect of object mastery and motor control. Although some of the character of the

30

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

first drawings may be attributed to lack of strength and coordination, most of the infants I have observed had more than sufficient motor control for drawing by about 14 months. My observations suggest that most of the apparent chaotic movement of the drawing hand is the product of intention. We will refer to this particular type of intentioned drawing action as randomized rather than random. The Structure of Objects and the Structure of Events We have considered the cross-modal associations which are essentially non-representational communications, in which the infant extends the natural impulse to exploit movements of his or her own body for expressive effect. However, these action-quanta become the base for action representations, in which drawing actions represent the movement of other objects or events. Action representations can occur with any level of mark-making. The following are examples of action representation which use First Generation Structure. Hidayat (4 years of age) makes a vigorous horizontal arc and says, ‘The aeroplane is moving fast’. A Chinese child, Joshua, at three years and eight months, makes an horizontal arcing movement of his drawing hand, and says it is a ‘fan’. Whilst the content or ‘subject matter’ is perhaps culturally specific, the structure, horizontal arc, is universal. Here, the fanning action isomorphically corresponds to the movement of a ‘fan’ —one ‘fanning’ movement stands for another fanning movement. In other action representations, however, the relationship between vehicle and referent is more complex. For example, Rosie, at 2 years, is drawing, when she happens to sneeze. As she sneezes, she makes a very sudden series of staccato stabbing actions of the pencil across the paper, resulting in a line of dots. Is she drawing the sneeze? This action representation is made from another First Generation Structure, the vertical arc. Tabatha Ng also uses the vertical arc, in conjunction with a Second Generation Structure, continuous rotation. At 2 years 3 months, she is slow in speaking: she can only pronounce one-syllable words. When drawing, she makes circular movements of her pencil. Then she starts barking like a dog whilst making dots around the page. Perhaps she is drawing the barking of the dog. Third Generation Structures may also be combined with developmentally earlier structures. For example, Ong Zheng Yi, at 2 years, makes a closed shape which he says is a balloon. He attaches a line to the closure, saying it is the string. Then he makes an explosive rotational marking on the perimeter line of the closed shape, saying the balloon has burst. In this example, configurative and action representation have been combined: the closed shape represents the shape, or configuration, of the balloon; the sudden rotational mark represents the action of the explosion. There may be further levels of meaning in both action and configurative representation. Some of these action representations may be unconscious expressions of anxieties about entropy, about life and death. They may be representations or expressions of aggression, either the child’s own, or that of other persons: for example, a 3-year-old makes a closed shape and then attacks its boundary line with sudden strokes, saying that a person gets stabbed and dies. Sometimes, what initially starts as an action representation of, for example, an object in motion, may result in a representation of the shape of the object. One example is Ben’s drawing, at 2 years 10 months, of ‘The Big Wheel’ at the fairground. With an intense elliptical motion of black and blue crayons, he draws its rotational movement, and this naturally results in the shape of the Big Wheel. The child is learning about a functional dependency (Athey, 1990) which sometimes exists between action and shape. Sometimes, there occurs an interaction between configurative and dynamic modes. At 2 years 2 months, Ben alternates between painting the shape of an aeroplane and its flight-path. In Figure 10, a continuous-contact line, a horizontal arc bisects a push-pull resulting in a cruciform shape, of which he says: ‘This is an aeroplane.’ This, then, refers to the shape or structure of the aeroplane. A few days later he paints an intense, elliptical circuit with a paint brush heavily loaded with dark blue, viscous paint. Whilst the brush is in motion, he makes the identical utterance, ‘This is an aeroplane,’ but in this case, the representational meaning is quite different (Figure 11). In this painting he represents, not the shape of the aeroplane, but its movement. Such representational modes are not always discernible in

ACTIONS AND SHAPES

31

the finished work. One needs to witness the painting episodes in progress, and listen to the way in which the child’s utterances correspond with the flow of the painting or drawing.

Figure 10

Figure 11

After the aeroplane painting, Ben explores the painting process for its own sake, combining rotational courses with an interest in simply covering an area in red paint. He places a paint pot on the painting surface and this serves as an axis around which he rotates a red brush. Rotation around an axis is a special case of continuous rotation—we saw another example above, in the observation of Hannah painting around a paint pot (p. 32). The covering aspect is another attractor system for the child. We will see other examples of the interplay between a concern with visual and dynamic structure as representation, and as structures of interest in themselves. Thus, action representation and configurative representation interact together with an investigation of structure for its own sake, as the child coordinates understandings of shape, location and movement with the processes of painting and drawing. Ben’s aeroplane painting is a case of action representation that monitors the continuous, unbroken trajectory of an object in motion or flight. Joel, at 2 years 4 months, runs a pink pen around on a fast-moving, elliptical course and, whilst the pen is in motion, he also remarks, ‘This is an aeroplane,’ meaning this to represent the flight-path rather than the shape of the aeroplane (Matthews, 1984, 1994a). It is worth noting that Ben and Joel did not know of each other’s aeroplane drawings and paintings. In representations by children who are of the same developmental level, similar content and

32

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

structure are likely to recur. Michael, aged 3 years, also runs a pen, this time a green one, on a whirling orbit and says, ‘It’s a spaceship,’ meaning a spaceship in flight. Movement as a Continuous Line and as Discrete Displacements in Time and Space Some action representations show events as continuous processes in time and space (like Ben’s and Joel’s aeroplane flight), other action representations break down the continuous passage of movement into discrete rhythmical displacements in space and time. We saw the forerunner of this in Hannah’s rhythmical dance of dots (p. 32). Ben, 2 years 2 months, also produces paintings in which rhythmic intervals of the stabbing paint brush follow a circuitous route around the painting surface, whilst he synchronizes, in one-toone correspondence, emphatic vocalizations which underscore and emphasize his painting actions. In symbolic play, both continuous trajectories and discontinuous, seriated steps are combined, as hand-held space-craft soar through the air, and hand-held figures are clompclomp-clomped along routes across the floor or table. These behaviours are sometimes carried from one medium domain to another. Sometimes, continuous and discontinuous passages of movement are combined together in action representations. An interesting example appears in a drawing by Ben at 2 years 2 months. This is an explicit representation of movement, based on the game which Linda and I play with him: ‘Round and Round the Garden, like a Teddy bear, One step, Two steps, Tickly Under There!’ In this game, the adult sings the slow, suspenseful incantation, ‘round and round the garden’, whilst tracing a continuous, unbroken, rotational course on the child’s palm. Then, synchronized with the words ‘one step, two steps’, the movement is broken up into discretely spaced intervals as the adult’s fingertips are ‘walked’ up the child’s arm until they reach under the child’s armpit, at which point, the termination of this movement is demarcated with an explosive tickle. This complex game involves continuous and broken lines; one-to-one correspondence; rhythmical, temporal spacing; beginning and end of trajectory; and demarcated points-of-arrival. In his drawing, Ben describes a continuous ellipse, representing going round and round the garden, and perhaps the shape of the garden itself, followed by discrete displacements of movement, represented by short dashes (Figure 12). This is an interesting example of the combination

Figure 12

of what were initially two separate drawing schemes. Additionally, Ben has drawn tadpole figures walking towards the garden, aligned at right angles to dashes which serve as little platforms or baselines. Action representations can show the movement of an entity from A to B, or a single impact or explosion, but they can also show more complex events. One example is when Hannah, at 3 years 7 months, draws ‘a man falling in

ACTIONS AND SHAPES

33

Figure 13

dustbin’. In a near continuous line she alternates between the configurative and dynamic aspects of the phenomenon, making a running commentary as she draws: ‘A man…his legs …his trousers…he bends over…he falls in a dustbin’ (Figure 13). In an elegant series of oil paintings on paper, which Ben, at 3 years 1 month, produces one after another, he alternates between configurative and dynamic thinking. Firstly, he paints a portrait of me as a tadpole figure. Then, he paints ‘someone washing’ in which these two different modes alternate in rapid succession, as he thinks about different aspects of the same phenomenon. Firstly, Ben paints the configuration of a water tap, or faucet, and immediately follows this with a swirling rotation of the brush to represent the swirling of water of ‘someone washing’. Immediately after this he paints a configurative representation of the arms reaching into the washbasin. The observations show many examples of children representing, within a series of paintings or drawings, or within a single work, their alternating thinking about the shapes and movements involved in an event. As I noted above, there is sometimes a functional dependency between description of movement and description of shape. Another example occurs after his painting of ‘someone washing’. Ben whirls the brush in an open horizontal arc to represent the rotation of a helicopter’s rotor blades, but the making of this action representation results in a configuration of the rotor blades. Children’s painting and drawing is not, of course, only concerned with representation. In the painting that completes this series, Ben explores the qualities of brush work and shape and line—from black, oily pools, to lacy, sensuous trails —in a painting in which all the structures used in the previous paintings are freed from representational intention and exuberantly combined together. It is necessary for the development of visual representation that the child has the opportunity to alternate between representational modes and structural investigation for its own sake. We have seen that there is a dialectical relation between the struggle to master visual structure and the discoveries that accrue in structural investigation (Matthews, 1984). The alternation between investigation of visual structure for its own sake and dynamic and configurative modes of representation can occur within a single painting. Ben paints the wreckage of a ‘smashed aeroplane’ (Figure 14). Here, for each new stroke, he picks up a new brush, loaded with a new colour, overlaying these differently coloured strokes to make the representation of the tangled wreckage. It is as if the child colour codes each action; as if each action deserves to be signalled with its own colour (Smith, 1983). After showing the shape of the wreckage, he then paints a longitudinal line down the page that ends with a splodge at the paper’s edge nearest him. The line represents the descending flight of the aeroplane; the splodge, its impact with the ground. That Ben is representing a vertical, downward movement is an interpretation supported by his accompaniment of this line with a ‘descending’ vocalization, which ends with an explosive sound, as he makes the final mark at the edge of the paper—as the aircraft smashes into the ground. This painting has many levels of meaning. He represents action and configuration of the crashed and crashing aeroplane. His colour coding of actions is a mathematical use of colour. He demarcates the end of a passage of movement with a demarcated lineending—metaphorically the ‘end of the line’ for the aeroplane. Additionally, he also encodes descent, and by implication higher and lower relations. We will see all these aspects developed in later paintings, drawings and other forms of representation. In young children’s painting, ideas often follow each other in time in an episodic way, though note that children do not always paint these in a sequence which follows a naturalistic sequence of temporal events. The structure of Ben’s

34

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 14

painting of the ‘smashed aeroplane’, for example, follows the sequence of the ideas as they occur to him. It may be that painting episodes like this are structured along the lines of conversations, in which a ‘topic’ occurs to the child and then is organized with reference to another person’s shared understandings of physical causal chains (Chafe, 1994). Not only are these events linked together in time, the alternating modes of representation are physically congruent or attached to each other as shapes. All of this has a bearing on later narrative and actions modes. These are conceptual interests we will find in many young children’s representations; the point of arrival or the moment of impact; the disintegration of a fast-moving object as it collides with the ground or another surface. They are all to do with the causal relations within events, the consequences of trajectories, the destiny of objects. These are interrelated themes which supply the content or subject matter of many children’s early representations. Children Distinguish Between the Structure of Events and the Structure of Objects Nigel (3 years 10 months) also clearly shows the distinction between the configurative and dynamic aspects of events, when he draws a thunderstorm and rain coming down. With a felt-tip pen he makes small dashes on the paper, saying: ‘Drops of rain…drop, drop…drop and drop drop. They’re all drops.’ Then he makes a travelling zigzag whilst synchronizing onomatopoeic vocalizations: ‘The thunderstorm’s going all the way,’ he says, as he makes the travelling zigzag move along the top edge of the paper. This is the dynamic aspect of the thundercloud, its movement across the sky. However, this is quickly followed by a consideration of its configurative aspect. He draws a longish closed shape and says, ‘This is what the thundercloud looks like’ (Matthews and Jessel, 1993b). Children’s thinking and representation of the structure of an event may result in the encoding of multiple aspects, or even ‘proto-views’ of the object or event. Hannah (aged 3 years 3 months 2 days) makes a drawing in which she says the ‘Clouds moving along and the rain is coming down’ (Figure 15). She firstly employs a travelling zigzag to show the rain

ACTIONS AND SHAPES

35

Figure 15

falling in sheets through a vertical axis, and then, by stabbing the pen down repeatedly against the paper, she represents the impact of individual raindrops against the ground. By thinking about the ‘raininess’ of rain, she arrives at what are, in effect, plan and elevation, as if rotating the scene through 90 degrees. This is the result of thinking about the axes of movement involved within the same phenomenon, rather than thinking of viewpoints per se. The juxtaposition of two different vectors of action involved in the scene results in images that evoke two distinctly opposing proto-viewpoints. We see the similar oppositional proto-views in a drawing of mountains and climbers by Joel at 2 years 11 months. Firstly, with the use of a continuous rotation, he shows the people going around the mountain, and then, with a line which moves ‘up’ and then abruptly ‘down’ the page—a single ascending-descending zigzag—shows their ascent up and down the mountain (Figure 31, p. 65). As with Hannah’s drawing of the rain and clouds, these proto-views of objects are the consequence—in a sense, the by-products—of action representation. They are the residual traces of the child’s consideration of movement through different axes or vectors. I will return to Joel’s mountain drawing in more detail later (see pp. 65–7). Ascending and descending movement is beginning to be represented in Joel’s drawings seven months before his mountain drawing. Sometimes this takes the form of an inverted U-shape used to describe the flight-path of imagined aeroplanes and people. For example, at 2 years 5 months, Joel uses a single arcing shape, which moves up the paper and down again, to show ‘…a man flying…a man running away’. We will encounter this rising arc or inverted U-shape many times. It encodes an ascent and descent, and by implication, higher and lower relations. These actions, of controlled ascent and descent are also practised and monitored, with similar spoken or sung commentaries, in play with hand-held toys, as we will see in detail in Chapter 5. Both Hannah and Ben, at 3 years 2 months and 3 years 3 months respectively, use the inverted U-shape to describe ascending and descending flight. Eventually, in describing these passages of movement, they arrive at depictions of certain objects, including bridges and tables, and the backs of horses (see Figures 16, 17 and 18). Sometimes action representation moves quickly from one medium to another, the child seamlessly editing different actions together. For example, Hannah (3 years 2 months) draws an aeroplane moving, and then, hardly interrupting the flow of her movement, carries this into an action in the third dimension, running from the table and using a sweeping

36

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 16

Figure 17

Figure 18

movement of her hand to knock down a tower of blocks. She maintains the smoothness of the trajectory and its direction of travel, even though this involves a discontinuation of drawing and the initiating of a movement involving her entire body in motion and ending with a sweep of her hand. This is suggestive of her knowledge, already acquired, about continuous paths of travel and how these might be represented. This kind of skill is rarely if ever noticed, let alone commented on, yet it has significance in terms of the body action and object manipulation coordinated towards an expressive and representational objective. We will see it again, in representational play, in the next chapter. Hannah also starts to encode higher and lower relations onto the drawing surface in action representations. At 3 years 2 months 7 days she makes a series of continuous ellipses which spiral away from her toward the farther edge of the paper. She says, ‘The bubbles are going up to the surface’ (Matthews, 1994a). In this example, the child combines what were initially two separate drawing actions. She can now translate a continuous rotation along a longitudinal axis. In the

ACTIONS AND SHAPES

37

next chapter, we will see children also combining ascending and descending flight with a rotational axis in dynamic play involving their entire bodies moving through time and space. As we noted in the last chapter, even these more subtle distinctions between different representational modes still fail to capture the richness of symbol use in the early years. Not all is representational in the sense that the mark or shapes stand for something explicit. In a series of drawings from 2 years 2 months to 2 years 3 months, we see Ben exploring rotational marking, seriated or clustered points in space, and beginnings and ends of line, sometimes with the lines explosively ending in clouds or star bursts of marks. These are explored as individual elements, or in combinations. These interests seem also to coincide with a feel for the materials and their possibilities, as well as an interest in the colour, or possibly the fluidity, of particular pens. Investigation of Structure One drawing is stamped with the artist’s little footprint—reminding us of the young age of this artist. This drawing is another result of running basic marking gestures across each other in contrasting direction. Here, both the rotational closure and the lines that run across them are made by minimal gestures, resulting in a near core and radial, or even a tadpole, structure. This is followed by an in-filled rotational closure from which lines are trailed. His use of in-filling may be made to emphasize a distinction between the two units—the two-dimensional elliptical shape and the unidirectional lines. Experiments in Singapore, which I will describe later (see pp. 43–5), suggest that children sometimes try to maximize the differentiation of shapes in this way. This sensitivity to differentiated units or elements is paralleled in the child’s language use too. I mentioned earlier that it occurs in very early vocalizations when babies differentiate in their enunciation of ‘pa’ and ‘ba’, in advance of the time when the distinction becomes crucial for meaning (Miller, 1990). It also occurs later, in the more complex forms of ‘babbling’. For example at 14 months, Keira’s ‘babbling’ is organized into sentence-like forms which suggests that she, like other children, generates a differentiated linguistic structure in advance of the formation of true words, as if this structure sets up the categories for parts of speech yet to come. These strings of phonemes act like ‘place-holders’ (to use Willats’ term; 1996, personal communication), which are ready in place for the arrival of true words arranged in true sentences. Similarly, in early drawing, the Singaporean studies suggest that, before children are able to coordinate explicitly defined representational shapes, they demarcate differentiated elements in abstract ‘objects’ which exist only in drawing but which emplace provisional shape categories which await further differentiation (see Figures 21 to 25). At age 2 years 10 months, Ben produces drawings of a ‘cockerel’, a ‘hen’ and ‘Rupert the Bear’. These configurations comprise head, body units. Ben is an unusual draughtsperson, but research in Singapore suggests that many young children may be able to associate two differentiated units together by aligning two rotationals, rather than the more difficult task of glancingly coinciding two closed shapes together (see Figure 22, p. 44). It seems that complexly differentiated forms may be made straight away—provided the child is not forced to be specific about the shape and location of the segments, their relationship to each other, and the actual way they are attached to each other. This may be derived from a direct percept, rather than a concept, but the child may not be able to build on it for a while. This means that observers may only see such an achievement once, and then nothing like it is seen perhaps for months, until the child has constructed the necessary conceptual scaffolding on which to return to these inventions. Another example, is Hannah at 2 years 8 months 5 days, who makes a painting in which Linda’s head, body and legs are painted in a sequence. The differentiation between these components is lost after subsequent repainting, but she remarks on these body parts as she produces them. Another example is a climber in Joel’s ‘mountain’ drawing which has his body, a head and knees (Joel, 2 years 11 months; Figure 31, p. 65). (This is an important drawing and I will describe it fully in Chapter 6.) Though drawings of mountains and climbers recur over following weeks, no such combination as the first one reappears for 10 months until he is sure about the position of parts in relation to each other. Another example is Figure 21, p. 44, by Campbell, an Australian child of 3 years 4 months.

38

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 19

Figure 20

Many forms of differentiation in young children’s drawing involve episodic thinking occurring over time. This means that these are often not apparent to an adult observer viewing the drawing as an end product. One example is the use of superimposition, when one patch of pigment is overlaid over another to indicate a different element is attached or another event has occurred. In a drawing by Ben at 2 years 4 months, his friend Gypsy is shown in a green car by superimposing a red patch over a green patch, whereas Ben is shown in a red car by the superimposition of a green patch over a red. I found the same device used by Singaporean children from 2 years to 4 years when asked to draw human figures, firstly from imagination, then from living and sculpted models. Some of the children seem to be trying to show that one part of the human body (i.e. ‘head’) is on top of another part (e.g. ‘trunk’) in a literal, physical sense that one

ACTIONS AND SHAPES

39

coloured patch is superimposed over another. Eventually, these children will organize the attachment of one shape to another using a vertical axis. Shape Is Action; Action Is Shape In drawings made from around 2 years 10 months to 3 years 2 months, Ben uses a sinusoidal, travelling line as a means of compressing vast distance into the small page. He, like other children who use this device, knows that journeys do not rotate around the same point. He uses the distortions allowable in topology to show distance. At 2 years 10 months Ben has mastered a continuous line that he can curve at will, in any direction; he can break down the line into its constituent parts, as dots in a linear sequence, or as clusters or groups. He can also stop and start his lines and change directions in an abrupt way, forming sharp angles. For the following two months, Ben continues to investigate line and contour, as structures of inte1rest in themselves; closures, both curvilinear and polygonal; rightangular structures; parallel groupings; zigzags; and sometimes as configurative and action representation. In addition to these structural variations, there are also variations in the sensitivity of the line according to the task, or representational purpose of the drawing. Depending on whether it is purely a structural investigation or a representation and, if it is a representation, depending on what is represented, there will occur variations in pressure, speed, rhythm, cadence and stress. Compare the two drawings Figures 55 and 56 on p. 91, for example, produced by Ben at 3 years 2 months. Figure 55 is produced first, and in this drawing there is no representational intention, he is investigating structure for its own sake. In the second drawing, however (Figure 56), he draws the same family of structures using the same red pen, but the quality of line is rather different, for the lines have denotational values attributed to them. This drawing is unusual for a 3-year-old, because it is drawn from observation, and because of denotational values of some of the lines, which represent the occluding contours of an object in his visual field; his mother, Linda wearing dungarees. We will consider this drawing in more detail in Chapter 7 when we consider the different sorts of information in drawings by children and artists, and how this is encoded on the drawing surface. This will entail our consideration of a popular and classic theory of which divides children’s drawing neatly into those derived from ‘visual’ information and those derived from ‘intellectual’ information. Much of this stage theory of children’s development in drawing has depended on the unquestioned assumption, derived from Piaget’s and Inhelder’s (1956) ideas, that very young children generalize closed contours and volumes of any shape to undifferentiated topological closures. This basic model of development has helped support a particular reading of the children’s drawing development, in which certain forms have become the necessary landmarks on a route toward some kind of naive realism. Tadpoles and Conventional Figures One of these landmarks is the tadpole figure; another—supposedly slightly more advanced—is the conventional figure. It is important to appreciate that such accounts are based upon measuring a supposed progression in children’s drawing toward an adult paradigm of drawing—the tadpole is, after all, one of the first visual representations that adults recognize. How should we understand the ‘tadpole’ figure, then? There are two main strands of development to consider: the tadpole as structure, and the tadpole as representation. In terms of structure, the tadpole has its roots in the core and radial form that is itself a special case of right-angular attachment. What were initially separate schemas of parallel grouped lines and closed shapes are, with the use of right-angular attachment, combined to form a completely new shape. This combination affords a contrasting differentiation between forms. Children do use the tadpole form to represent human figure, but they also use it to represent many other forms too. Regarding it solely in terms of the representation of the human figure distorts our understanding of drawing development. Because many researchers focus on the tadpole exclusively as a representation of the human figure, they

40

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

ask why children do not differentiate a body unit. In terms of graphic production, a conventional figure may present production problems in attaching two closed shapes together. It is easier to bisect a perimeter line of a closure with a straight line than it is to make two closures glancingly kiss (Matthews, 1997a). Maureen Cox (1993) also acknowledges this problem. There is a conceptual issue too. Some writers, for example, Claire Golomb (1974, 1992) and Rudolf Arnheim (1954) have suggested that children cannot initially differentiate head and body and that the closed shape represents head and body undifferentiated, combined as one unit. John Willats suggests that, initially, children differentiate and categorize visual forms into four main groups. Some forms are classified by the child as ‘saliently extended’ in three dimensions; other forms are treated as extended in two dimensions; others are extended in one dimension; and finally there are those forms which are unextended in any dimension. These four groups could be thought of as ‘lumps’, ‘slabs’, ‘rods’ and ‘points’ respectively. John Willats suggests that, for the child, representing the human figure might be an issue of how to best utilize this limited repertoire of ‘picture primitives’ in order to obtain the maximum contrast between forms (Willats, 1985, 1995). For some reason, researchers do not wonder why the child does not produce some of the many other possible segmentations of the body, for example, head, neck, shoulders, hips, legs, knees, toes, etc., etc. With the exception of hips and shoulders, young children have no difficulty locating these parts, and they often appear in their drawings. Natalie and her baby, Keira (aged 1 year) play a game in which Natalie sings the song, ‘Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes’, whilst touching the appropriate part of her body. The child is expected to participate, echoing these actions. Keira has no trouble indicating precisely head, knees and toes, though on the word, ‘shoulders’ it is notable that she vaguely waves her hands around in the empty air. Shape Defined by Patches; Shape Defined by Line In some of my own experiments in Singapore drawings, when children are asked to draw from the human model, or from three dimensional tadpole and conventional figures, set before them, some children who normally draw tadpoles attempt to place a body unit between head and legs. They do so using a hazy, undifferentiated patch, rather than a clearly defined linear contour. I suggest that when children are sure about how to describe the identity, position and shape of a component, they will use a linear construction. If, on the other hand, they are unsure how to describe identity, place and shape, they will use an undifferentiated ‘placeholder’ (Winner, 1986). It seems possible that this ‘placeholder’ may, through a process of ‘vertical decolage’, be built upon the kind of arm-waving ‘placeholders’ enacted in space by Keira and other babies. These actions may be regarded as a kind of non-marking drawing in threedimensional space (Matthews, 1997a). Another interesting way in which both English and Singaporean children represent head, body and legs sequences, is when they cover over a region of the legs of their tadpole figures with additional crayoning, avoiding both the lower legs and the head. They often say that they are putting clothes on the figure. A consequence of this ‘clothing’ representation is that they arrive at a head, body and legs sequence. For example, Debbie says that she is putting ‘swimming trunks’ on a tadpole figure of her father (see Figure 24). Another example is Hannah’s drawing (at age 3 years 6 months 19 days) of a little girl which starts off as a tadpole, over which she superimposes a ‘skirt’, creating, almost as a side-effect, head, body and legs sequence (see Figure 23). This shows that even tadpole drawers are not necessarily restricted to this configuration and, when a new representational context prompts them, will add to it, revealing an understanding of the relationship between head, body and legs. This is a special case of event representation, in which it is the act of clothing, by screening, covering, or superimposition, which results in a differentiated ‘placeholder’ for the body (Matthews, 1984, 1994a, 1997a) (see Figures 21, 23, 24, 25). Even very young, so-called ‘scribblers’, of 2 years of age when confronted with visible models, and with minimal advice from an adult, make structural differentiation in their drawings. Although to the casual observer it might appear that the

ACTIONS AND SHAPES

41

Figure 21

youngest children fail to respond to these tasks, in fact detailed analysis shows that even the very youngest vary significantly the graphic structures they deploy, depending on whether they were drawing from imagination or from observation. It is unusual for children in their spontaneous drawings to work from objects set before them. However, most of the children in my research, even the youngest, when they were requested to draw from observation, either attempted to represent human figure or three-dimensional models before them, or else make infrastructural differentiation in response to differentiated models. This infrastructural differentiation, I suggest, is akin to that formed in language acquisition prior to the first words and sentences. The children are capturing the deepest level of invariant structure that of ‘differentiation in itself, in markings normally termed ‘scribbling’. Other findings from my Singaporean studies contrast with Piaget’s idea that children represent all differently shaped closures with undifferentiated closures. I found that, even very young children, between 2 and 3 years of age will attempt to represent the differences between objects with differently shaped contours, a solid sausage-shaped form, and solid sphere (Matthews, 1997b). Even children of 2 years 6 months modify First Generation Structure, push-pull and horizontal arc, to show the difference between the shape of these objects. Some 3-year-olds use a circular schema to represent the sphere whilst adapting a rectangular closure to represent the sausage-shaped form. Other children, who do not draw clearly differentiated closures, produce more parallel lines when confronted with the elongated object, and more curving lines when confronted with the sphere. Other children adapt rotational marking for the sphere, viewing the object and slowing down their rotations considerably. To represent the sausage shape, these children stretch rotations along one dimension (see Figures 26, 27). Where the differentiation does not show up in the finished drawing, it is easy to see a difference when observing the process of drawing. In fact, Piaget, in one tantalizing sentence, admits that childen vary their ‘scribbles’ when confronted by a different two-dimensional model (Piaget and Inhelder, 1956).

42

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 22

Figure 23

Although this is a small sample, all of the children in my study try to show, in their drawings, the difference between each object. John Willats (1997) has argued that when children draw closures to represent objects, there is no clear way of knowing whether they are representing a view of the object, or using the closed shape to stand for the object’s volumetric entirety in a topological sense. Are the drawings of sausage-shaped object and spherical object, representations of views of those objects, or do they show the extendedness of the objects in a topological sense? Willats believes that children initially may use line to map regions within the visual field rather than the contours of shapes. However, my studies suggest that even very young children do capture some information about contours of

ACTIONS AND SHAPES

43

Figure 24

Figure 25

Figure 26

shape. The impression gained in watching at least some of these children draw each object is that they are sensitively recording, in line, quite subtle puckers in the surfaces of the objects; they are drawing contours of objects rather than using closures or rotational or other shapes to stand for regions. Given the episodic nature of the drawing process for the young child, there seems no reason why children should not alternate between different approaches to the use of line. We will return to the question of whether children are drawing contours or regions, or views or volumes later, when we consider how children draw other objects, including human figures and tables (see pp. 86–9).

44

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure27

It may be, as John Willats (1997) has suggested, that when young children represent a two-dimensional closed-shape, or a three-dimensional form, they represent the ‘primary’ property of topological closure, before considering ‘secondary’ properties such as parallel straight sides, or corners. In my experiments, many children succeed in combining primary and secondary properties simultaneously. The lack of corners in the objects may assist them, since drawing corners requires mastery of angular variation. To test this possibility, other experiments were made by this author, to see how children between ages 2 years 7 months and 6 years 1 month represent the difference between a sphere and cube. Though the multifaceted structure of the cube did present the children with complex drawing issues, nevertheless it was found that, with few exceptions, even the younger children produced forms of representation encoding the structure of a cube, and that, when angular variation was too difficult, produced other, more unusual forms of representation to show vertices and faces. The representational intention did not always show up clearly in the finished drawing, but it was clear in observations of the drawings as processes in time (Matthews, 1998, forthcoming). It is often noted that very young children are reluctant to occlude part of the boundary of an object in their drawings but try to preserve its outline. This is probably because occluding part of the boundary disrupts the child’s conception of the wholistic volumetric entirety of objects. Piaget thought that it was the figural schema, with its entire enclosing boundary, which children did not like to violate. He referred to this as the ‘boundary taboo’ (Piaget and Inhelder, 1966). This is one of the reasons why children have difficulties showing view-specific information in their drawings. The use of occlusion and hiddenline elimination disrupts the child’s understanding of the identity of the object, which for a while depends on its coherent, entire boundary. Lange-Kuttner and Reith (1995) point out that this might explain young children’s successes in recent variations of Piaget’s original Three Mountain experiment. In these variations, unlike the original, the child is not obliged to occlude part of the boundary of objects. This, they suggest, may mean the original experiment reveal more about children’s dislike of breaking contour boundaries than it shows their understanding or misunderstanding of depth relations—a suggestion which is pertinent to the present book. Lange-Kuttner’s and Reith’s suggestion fits in with findings from another study I carried out in Singapore. Topological representation in children’s early drawings may be the effect of their trying to preserve the continuity of contour, at the expense of the shape of the contour. For example, when objects are occluded one behind another, children are reluctant to sacrifice the boundary of the further object, because their understanding of an object is one of a coherently contoured form. They will preserve this aspect even at the expense of distorting the distinctive contours of shapes which, in other contexts, they would have no difficulty in representing. In one of these studies in Singapore, two three-dimensional tadpole models were placed one in front of the other, before the children. Some children, in their drawings, drastically distorted what were clearly perfectly straight legs of the nearer tadpole in order not to run over the shape of the distant tadpole. The children were perfectly aware that one object was behind another and showed this in their drawings. They also were perfectly capable of drawing reasonably straight lines, so the only reason for distorting them was to preserve their continuity at the expense of their direction of travel and shape (Matthews, 1997a). However, there are occasions when children do spontaneously show a kind of occlusion by using what seems to be the forerunner of hidden-line elimination. One example is when they attach legs at

ACTIONS AND SHAPES

45

Figure 28

a T junction to the base of a triangular skirt. This shows the legs going behind or under the skirt, whilst at the same time it does not violate the general shape of the legs (Figure 28). Later intellectual revolutions in representational understanding allow children to overcome their reluctance to sacrifice the continuous contours of objects. They understand that objects may be represented with disrupted contours if these objects are partially occluded by nearer objects that interrupt their line of sight to them. We will see many examples in which children’s visual representation undergo revolutions, in which new stipulations about the relations between and within events and objects are integrated with new ways in which art processes themselves may be organized. Although it is unusual for very young children to draw objects from direct observation, the structures they deploy when confronted with the task of drawing from observation do occur in spontaneous drawing. As we have seen, drawing is a dialectical process in which children use visual media as a vehicle for the expression of emotions, to consider the shape and movement of objects, and also as a structure in itself. Children generate all the necessary differentiated forms, relations and structural principles within imaginary two-dimensional objects that emerge on the drawing surface. Conclusion In this chapter we have considered the dialectical relationship between three main aspects of children’s use of visual media: • The representation of shape and movement. • The expression of emotion. • Infrastructural investigation.

46

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

We have seen that during the phase of so-called ‘scribbling’, children use visual media to represent the shape and structure of both objects and events. They also vary the stress, amplitude and cadence of drawing actions in response both to emotion and according to the nature of the drawing task. It seems probable that very young children are able to show more differentiation within and between forms in their drawings than has been thought. Although these abilities seem to be based on unlearned potentialities unfolding from within them, the success of children’s investigations depends a great deal on the availability of an arena of activity in which they are allowed to access different routes toward structure. Unless certain optimal conditions are available in which children can move freely between structural investigation for its own sake, and the representational affordances that accrue on the drawing surface, they are not able to build upon their emergent abilities.

Chapter 5 Chaos and Order: Dynamical Systems in the Art of Young Children

Before we continue to follow the development of children’s drawing, we need to consider some other aspects of representation and expression forming in infancy that influence drawing. Children’s drawing i located within a family of expressive and symbolic actions used fluently by children between 3 and 4 years of age. The members of this family of actions have a mutually reciprocal relationship and are fundamental to the development of cognition and affect. Many of these actions are deceptively trivial looking; forms of behaviour that are overlooked or taken for granted by many, if not actively suppressed. Some researchers and lay people consider these actions as extraneous to drawing and to the development of visual representation. Yet together, these modes of action provide the basis for representation and expression. Embedded within chaotic actions we might observe in any nursery or kindergarten are the beginnings of thought which has logicomathematical, linguistic, spatial, kinaesthetic, dynamic and configurative dimensions (Matthews, 1996a). Patterns of Action: Dynamical Systems Although these actions look chaotic, they are driven and organized by dynamical systems that sweep through children’s interaction with a range of media. We have already observed the beginnings of these structures in the previous chapter. They are, ascending and descending trajectories; movements through vertical and horizontal axes; curving or arcing flights and rotational movements; points in space, including clustered or scattered points; seriated points; and the beginnings and ends of lines. Closed shapes are a special kind of deep action pattern that we will consider later. These dynamic patterns of action form the beginnings of understandings about movement, location and changes of position. This chapter will look at the cross-modal transference of these structures, between two, three and four dimensions, and across media domains. We will see how actions made in three dimensions of space, plus the dimension of time, are transferred to the two-dimensional world of the drawing surface; reciprocally, we will see that sometimes shapes and actions performed in drawing, act almost like notations for dance-like forms. In Chapter 2, we saw the infant investigating and playing with lines of sight, overlap and occlusion. These investigations about viewpoint, about visual transformation caused by movement of the object around its own axis, or through displacements in space, and other transformations caused by changes of state, are later explored all over again at successive levels of cognition. In this chapter we will start by looking deeply at the representational aspects of children’s play with hand-held toys. The following is from a microanalysis of a video-recorded observation made at a Singaporean kindergarten. A 4-year-old girl, Joanne Chong, stands in the doorway of her classroom. She holds in her right hand, at her eye level, and at about 15 cms from her face, a Lego construction she has made. Using both hands, she rotates the toy before her eyes, carefully studying its changing appearance as it moves through several complete rotations. Continuously maintaining the fluidity of the movement, she raises the toy to eye level, again at about 15 cms distance and, in an alternating, oscillating manner, moves the toy on its own axis from left to right, left to right, left to right,

48

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

relative to her own station-point. As she does this, she sways her head and body from side to side, in a gentle movement which both reiterates the movements of the toy, and also allows her to vary, a little, her line of sight to the object. Then she lets go her left hand from the toy and with her right hand flies the object to her right and then back in a curving flight to her left. All of this movement is a beautiful, seamless flow, which combines moving the object about its own axis whilst simultaneously moving it on rotational and ascending trajectories. Throughout this movement, Joanne maintains a face-on line of sight to the object. Without breaking the flow of movement, she rotates clockwise on the spot, with two hands rotating the object in front of her face. By skilful manipulation, Joanne maintains a direct line of sight to the handheld toy throughout its complex orbit, which not only combines rotational axis with ascending and descending trajectories but also a rotation around its own axis. Joanne organizes her own viewing actions to obtain a single image of the spacecraft. She holds the spacecraft with both hands and, as she oscillates it in front of her face, she closes one eye, and looks at the object with her other eye. She has learnt a strategy for obtaining a monocular, single-image field of vision. Then, she lets go her left hand from the toy, and uses this hand to cover her left eye. The closing of one eye to obtain a singleimage of an object or scene is a technique familiar to artists who draw from observation, yet children discover it spontaneously in play (Matthews, 1990, 1994a). It is not the result of training or induction into particular art praxis (Wartofsky, 1980). Through play experiences, Joanne has spontaneously discovered the disparity between the images of each eye, and it is through play that she has learnt to obtain a single image. She is constructing a view of the object. This selection and maintenance of a view will affect visual representation. We will later see view-specific information carried over to the two-dimensional drawing surface. The Choreography of Play The movement of the object is subtly calibrated in terms of speed and emphasis. The girl continuously visually tracks and monitors the flight, managing, apparently effortlessly, the transference of the object from one hand to another as well as maintaining its complex planetary motion of rotation upon its own axis whilst moving through a larger orbit around her body. In a softly spoken voice, Joanne associates the spacecraft’s movements with a narrative, a commentary which derives from those early ‘commentaries’ (Harris, 1989, p. 22) about events played in the ‘potential space’ formed between her and her parents (Winnicott, 1971). She nests orbits one inside another, the object rotating upon its own axis whilst also pursuing a wider orbit. Joanne also uses techniques to re-run and ‘freeze-frame’, from the main action, particular visual transformations and images she wishes to isolate. She can hold in her mind the represented event whilst she imaginatively ‘edits’ these small ‘clips’ and ‘stills’ into her play. Although I use terms derived from the film medium, Joanne’s play is not derived from imitation of television or cinema. It is based on those deep structures of movement, shape and location of objects in space and time. Television may influence her play, but mostly in terms of content. Essentially, her play derives from two main modes of representation, the dynamic and configurative: dynamic, in the careful monitoring of the continuous trajectory; configurative, in terms of selection of single, frozen images from this continuous movement. As Joanne moves her object through its last rotation around her body, a boy, Li Jen, is hovering on the edge of her field of action. He is holding a toy in his right hand, looking at her play with great interest and emulating the rising arc of her toy’s flight-path. He is gradually edging his toy nose-forward into the stream of her elliptical motion. A moment later, he allows himself to be swept into the whirlpool. As she makes her clockwise trajectory, so the flight of his toy echoes hers, and he also moves into a clockwise course. Together, their revolutions result in a complex binary system in which she moves in an elliptical orbit whilst he orbits her. Along these larger orbits, the handheld toys move through their own smaller fluctuations; orbits within orbits. Both children represent and demonstrate ascending and descending flight combined with a rotational axis, making a variety of spiralling orbits. Both these axes are also to be encoded by the children in two dimensions.

CHAOS AND ORDER: DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS IN THE ART OF YOUNG CHILDREN

49

Figure 29

Figure 30

Whilst carefully calibrating the movements of the toys, these children manage to maintain eye contact with the object, and clearly study the transformations it undergoes due both to changes of position along a linear course, and changes of position through movements of its own axis (see Figures 29 and 30). Both children are also aware of each other’s line-of-sight. The only mistake the boy makes is when, in order to show his spacecraft to Joanne, he holds it uncomfortably close to her face—an action typical of very young children. Evaluating this solely in terms of object mastery, or the acquisition of knowledge structures, misses out the kinematic and aesthetic qualities of the actions. In Chapter 2 we saw how the skills of viewing and handling objects originate from emotional and motivational processes which project measured impulses into the infant’s exploration of the world (Trevarthen, 1995), and so weave handling and viewing into one seamless flow. Handling operations are organized with aesthetic ends in mind; that is to say, the handling of the object is patterned by the intention of obtaining a view and of achieving a particular visual effect. In Joel’s play (from 3 years 2 months), toy figures, held one in each hand, represent opposing forces. He performs the basic vectors through which the actors move, going around, and going up and down over objects in the microterrain, and going through bound volumes, like tubes. Another conceptual concern is that of connectivity and, in temporary breaks from the play mode, he works out technical problems of how to connect things together; for example, plasticine and wire. By uncoupling words from objects and actions from meaning (Vygotsky, 1966), play allows him to assimilate

50

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

these and other found materials—metal tubing, plasticine, and even brick rubble—into this analogue world, in addition to ready-made toys. We can see him orchestrating a variety of conceptual concerns; those about continuity of trajectories and about the internal consistency of sequences of events; those about the continuously transforming interrelationship of lines-of-sight between imagined protagonists in micro-universes. Piaget imagined that very young children were locked into a state of egocentricity, and were incapable of comprehending points of view in space other than their own. However, it has been found that in situations which make sense to them, and which are not complicated by other issues, children are able to understand, at least generally, what another person would see from a different position in space. This is true in young children’s play, in which the movements of hand-held figures are orchestrated with respect to their imagined lines-ofsight. In Joel’s play, his actors’ lines-of-sight are organized according to their imagined psychology, the intentions and motivations which initiate their movements (see Figures 32 and 33, p. 71). I will describe this more fully in the next chapter, when it has a bearing on line of sight and viewpoint as represented in drawings. Experiences Constructed on the Drawing Surface We find all of these actions, performed in the three dimensions of space, plus the dimension of time, transferred to the drawing surface. All kinds of arcing, waving, swaying, rocking movements are echoed and re-echoed between body action and the two-dimensional analogue world of the drawing surface. Not only do actions in the round come to be represented on the two-dimensional surface, the act of drawing will itself alert the child to the existence of these structures and relations in the external environment. Drawing is guiding and organizing the child’s perception of the environment. The infant investigates ascent and descent in the real world and also represents these in play. Joanne’s and Li Jen’s trajectory play with hand-held objects are good examples. Children also transfer this experience over onto the drawing surface, encoding ascent and descent in two-dimensions. Since babyhood, in play and investigative actions, objects are experimentally dropped from varying heights, from prams and chairs, whilst the infant watches the effects. They watch the visual transformations caused by changes of position (Athey, 1990). The child also represents upward and downward flight in various ways. Ascent and descent in the real, three-dimensional world is reiterated in the movement of a longitudinal line along the paper surface, the child often synchronizing an ascending or descending vocalization to emphasize and analogue the imagined ascent or descent in two-dimensional space. Hannah (2 years 2 months) draws a ‘descending’ line, that is, a line pulled towards her, which she accompanies with a ‘descending’ vocalization—a vocalization that descends through a musical scale. As this line reaches the bottom edge of the paper and has to stop, Hannah, without breaking the flow of the action, picks up a pair of headphones (part of my recording equipment) from the table and drops them off the edge. She watches their descent and, as they hit the floor, she utters the sound, ‘Bop!’ Between the two parts of the action, Hannah has no time to plan. She links seamlessly the descent of the earphones to the descent of line immediately preceding it. The dynamic structure of descending line is so powerful that it sucks available content into it effortlessly, fluidly. She marks the end of this descent through three dimensions of space with a vocalization which emphasizes the moment of impact. This is essentially the same pattern of action as her demarcation of the ends of two-dimensional drawn lines. To complete this observation, the instant after the headphones drop on the floor, the cat, sleeping on the fireguard, happens to knock something on the floor and Hannah quickly runs over to investigate.

CHAOS AND ORDER: DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS IN THE ART OF YOUNG CHILDREN

51

Continuous and Discontinuous Displacements in Time and Space Children use their whole bodies or objects in space to investigate changes of position. In trajectory play, as described above, the child monitors a continuous path of movement and also isolates individual samples of the optical array from the continuous flow. In the previous chapter, I described how children also break down movement passages into constituent rhythmic intervals. In play, this is practised by all kinds of stepping and hopping games; by jumpings, slappings, beatings and countings. These discrete units of action are organized in two main ways, jumping in clusters of positions, or ‘spots’, around a particular region on the ground, or else seriated points along a linear course. Both types of displacements, clusters of points or seriated points, are recorded in children’s drawing in the form of clusters or groupings of dots or spots, and ‘lines’ of dots. As indicated, sometimes these points of action are ‘counted’, initially with sounds, in a one-to-one correspondence between action and vocalization; later, with the first conventional verbal tags or ‘numerons’ (Gelman and Gallistel, 1983)—though not initially in the conventional sequence. These patterns of action are, at particular phases of development, quite robust and they persist from domain to domain. Whilst there do occur significant variations due to media change, what is perhaps even more striking is the child’s detection of these structures despite changes in media, and despite the addition or subtraction of a dimension. For example, a flying arc or a rotational movement, depending on whether they are transposed from action-in-the-round to the drawing surface, or from drawing to action-inthe-round, lose or gain a dimension. It is also striking that the child will detect the same characteristic structure from one sensory modality to another as, for instance, in the synchrony of vocalization with actions. In a multi-channeled process, drawing plays a special role in alerting the child to the presence of these structures in the environment. The child detects closure, inside and outside, parallelism and attachment between forms in both the environment of drawing and the physical environment. Other structures, for example, angular variation also occur in two dimensions and three dimensions; in the core and radial structure of a drawing of the sun, or a clock; or in the spokes of a bicycle wheel, or the fanning leaves of a ‘travellers’ palm tree. Likewise, ‘corners’ can equally be said to exist in both drawing and the physical world. It can occur in the dimension of time too, in the child’s spinning on the spot with arms outstretched, or in his or her experimental opening and closing of a door. It is in the recovery of such invariant structures, or non-accidental properties, which allows the child to construct a coherent description of reality from disparate phenomena. An interesting example of the transference of the same deep pattern of action or conceptual interest carried across media domains, and across time, occurs in a sequence recorded in a Singaporean nursery. Two Chinese girl friends, Joanne Chong and Melody Lim, paint seriated dashes in parallel horizontal patterns. They find this activity so interesting that they continue for over an hour! A week later, Joanne draws, for her friend, a series of tiny closures in a line. A few children gather around to watch. Then, the two Chinese girls, plus an Indian boy, play with necklaces. These necklaces are really strings of tiny three-dimensional volumes that perhaps reiterate the same conceptual interest of linked, seriated two-dimensional closures. The next week, Joanne Chong continues her interest in serialized shapes, this time with a structural variation—she draws multiple strings of zigzags, again arranged in linear sequences. She continues for over an hour, until all the paper is crowded with intricate sequences of zigzags (Matthews, 1994b). Continuous Rotation Like the other attractors, as the continuous rotation emerges it sweeps through the child’s interaction with a range of media. It acts as an information-seeking structure, alerting the child to all forms of rotational phenomena in the visual and dynamic environment. It guides the forms of action the child performs on objects and media. We find a good vertical decolage of development of this pattern of action in the study of Hannah. By about 1 year, children are able to produce a variety of rotational movements. The synchronization of sound to smaller rotations made by arm and hand occurs later, sometimes with a held object. Hannah (aged 1 year 7 months 20

52

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

days), for example, makes for the first time a continuous clockwise rotational movement of a held object, a piece of bread, against the surface of her tray. The fact that Hannah constrains her actions so as to create smaller rotations is in itself important. The rotational movements become more complex, involving other, secondary inner rotations and other oscillations. Two months later, rotational movement is combined with other, interior oscillations, orbits within orbits. These will be fully developed, by age 3 and 4 years, like the Singaporean children’s superbly calibrated trajectory play described above. By 1 year 9 months, Hannah learns to combine a rotational axis with another deep attractor, vertical descent and moment of impact. Whilst rotating on the spot, she flails a tape measure outward from her hand, singing a rising and falling song which seems to analogue the rotational movement. A few moments later, she allows the tape measure to uncoil from her hand whilst associating with its descent, a descending musical scale. In nine months’ time, at 2-and-ahalf years, we will see Hannah combine both these axes, rotation and descending line—together with musical vocalizations—on the twodimensional drawing surface. At age 2 years 3 days, Hannah sits at a table and draws, with a felt-tip pen, an anticlockwise rotation. At the conclusion of this dynamic series of overlapping ellipses, she lifts up the pen and says, ‘Round!’ At just over 2 years of age, from many different kinds of rotational experiences, occurring across a range of different media, Hannah has detected the structure which remains the same, that of ‘roundness’. Like other children, Hannah detects, from within the environment, all manner of rotational experiences and assimilates them into this rotational shape. Hannah draws ‘watches’, ‘hats’, ‘bodies’ with basically the same pattern of action, ‘going-round’. The content changes within the micro-scale of an individual child’s development; from child to child, and from culture to culture; For example, 3-year-old Chinese Singaporean says his rotation is a ‘fishball’ (a Singaporean dish), whilst another says hers is a ‘lion-dance’, unlikely content for most London children. However, the structure itself, at the deepest level of understanding, remains essentially unchanged and is detected and used expressively and for representation by all children (see Figure 4, p. 25). Closed Shape Very often, another deep structure of drawing emerges out of the rotational experience—the closed shape. In most of the cases I observed, the closed shape seems to be the outcome of rotational experiences (Figure 7, p. 28). (Other basic structures, right-angular structure, parallel forms, travelling zigzags, U-shape on baseline, also seem to evolve from earlier experiments with line and shape.) Very often, the closed shape is arrived at when the child learns to curtail continuous rotation after one or two circuits. The closed shape is a profound discovery for the child. Emerging at around two to three years of age, its representational possibilities are far reaching. It is soon used to describe the faces or volumes of objects. For example, at 2 years 2 months, Hannah draws closures first on paper, and then on her hand or wrist, representing ‘watches’. The closed shape is also used to specify the topological relationship between inside and outside. This is a spatial relationship that young children find extremely powerful and which they frequently represent in drawings and other media. It is often the topological property of enclosure which young children note in many objects and which they are primarily concerned in representing. A good example is Ben’s drawing of a house, in Figures 34, 42 and 43. Paul Light suggests that a reason for children’s interest in insideoutside relations is the stability of this relationship. Whereas projective relations are a consequence of the observer’s relation to the scene and are therefore prone to change, either because of observer movement or movement of the objects observed, the insideoutside relation remains stable despite any movements (Light, 1985). Object ‘A’ remains inside object ‘B’ no matter what movements are made by the observer or what movements the container makes—unless it is turned upside down. (Emptying strategies will be discussed shortly.) Ben’s drawings of a house are explored in more detail on p. 77.

CHAOS AND ORDER: DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS IN THE ART OF YOUNG CHILDREN

53

The Discovery of the Inside As Tom Bower has written, it is a landmark in development when infants discover the inside relationship (Bower, 1982). Bower has suggested that the infant moves through phases in which he or she periodically updates understandings about the form, movement and location of objects, in the light of new experiences. In Chapter 2 we considered how the infant coordinates schemes about the object at rest and the object in motion (Bower, 1982). Around 6 months the infant discovers that one object cannot take up the volume of another object. However, when confronted with the phenomenon of objects disappearing inside containers, this early rule is updated to take account of new experiences. The infant learns that the object can occupy the volume of another object, if it is inside that object (Bower, 1982; Athey, 1990). When children discover this relationship it forms a new attractor system, which alerts their attention to any new manifestation of inside-outside. The infant uses all manner of container to explore inside and outside relations. Sometimes this is to the exasperation of parents, when father’s watch is experimentally dropped into a lavatory, or mother’s shoes are filled with orange peelings, or when a slice of toast is pushed into the video machine. All of these true examples also involve size comparisons, and the last is an interesting example of shape comparison. Another interesting example of size and shape comparison in relation to inside-outside relations, occurs when Joel, aged 13 months, explores brushes and paint pots in my studio. In one filmed observation, Joel tries repeatedly to put a 12.5 cm brush into an 8.5 cm pot. The inside-outside relation is here undergoing a size modification (see Figure 6, p. 27). In the same episode, we see Joel building up understandings of fullness and emptiness too. He uses the learned strategy of up-turning the container, to enjoy and study spilling liquid yellow paint. Seventeen months later, the knowledge he has acquired about containing three-dimensional solids and liquids inside three-dimensional containers is translated into two dimensions. By about 2 years 5 months, Joel extrapolates the closed shape from the continuous rotations. From this time we begin to see him carefully placing nuclei inside these closed shapes. Sometimes he further differentiates these nuclei by making them in a colour distinct from the one he uses to produce the closed shape. In one drawing, produced at 2 years 5 months 20 days, he is sorting out different kinds of marks and grouping them according to class in different locations within a closed shape. In this drawing, pull lines are carefully restricted to one side of the closure; rotational marks on the other. It is as if Joel is saying to himself, this kind of line is different from that kind of line, and they need to be placed in different locations. This is an example of early mathematical logic. The infant is developing ‘set theory’. This understanding is carried across media and contexts. For example, at this time, Joel also groups his toy cars and figures according to kind. Children quickly realize the very powerful representational and expressive possibilities of the closed shape. At 2 years 5 months 22 days, Joel is using this shape to enclose nuclei he says are ‘babies’. As he marks a little nucleus into the closed shape he has drawn he says, ‘There’s a baby in ‘ere…a baby in the water’. In such drawings, children are starting to consider the enclosing contour line as representing an edge or boundary (Matthews, 1984, 1994a). These two terms are not synonymous, however, and the children themselves use the enclosing line to represent both types of interface. It is often impossible to say exactly to which purpose the enclosing contour is being put, whether to show entire volume in its entirety, or a single face as if seen from a general position in space (Willats, 1997). Right-angular Attachment and Core and Radial Between 2 and 3 years of age, children start to combine different drawing actions, to make more complex forms. Some combinations are the result of associating together, and even attaching, drawing structures which were initially discovered and produced separately. The germinal beginnings of the principles of associations, connectivity and synthesis were heralded in the explorations of visual structure described earlier, when lines crossed over each other due to playful variation of drawing actions. The child notices and purposely arranges lines to cross over each other at approximate right angles, or else attaches lines together at around the perpendicular. These approximate right-angular

54

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

attachments create a striking contrast between forms and it is probably for this reason that it becomes a powerful structural principle for children (Willats, 1990, personal communication). A special case of right-angular attachment is the core and radial (Athey, 1990) (see Figure 8, p. 28). The child greets the emergence of this structure with great interest. For example, At 2 years 6 months, Hannah is drawing with a green felt-tip pen on an A4 pad. She makes an energetic clockwise rotation which she immediately says is ‘a hat’. She resumes rotational drawing whilst synchronizing a vocalization—‘ooooooooooo’—along an ascending musical scale. She follows this by making a series of impacts with little vertical stabs of the pen, accompanying the production of these dots with a one-toone correspondence of the vocalization, ‘dit-dit-dit-dit’, and creating a course of dots anticlockwise around the perimeter of the rotational shape. As she turns towards me, she pulls the pen towards her body, forming a line which moves out from the perimeter line at an approximate right angle. She makes a further rotational course over the central portion of the rotation thus far achieved. She appears to look thoughtfully down at this. She then makes two dots in quick succession. ‘Two eyes!’ she exclaims, and then she counts—‘Two—three…’ whilst making a one-to-one correspondence between these words and the two sharp pointing motions of the hand-held pen, in the air above each dot. Half turning to me, but continuing to attend to the drawing beneath her face, she says to me, ‘I made eyes—I made his body. I—I made his hat, round and round’. At this time, ‘hats’, ‘bodies’ and ‘watches’ are some of the forms to which the attractor of going around alerts her attention. She reinforces her description, ‘round and round’, by mapping a rotating finger mimetically 15cms directly over the rotational mark. Hannah makes a series of dots which run in an anticlockwise direction around the perimeter of the rotational shape. Some of the vertical arcs she employs to make this last series of dots are more like slashes of the pen which result in little lines ranging in length from 1 cm to 2cms, and which dissect the perimeter line of the closed shape formed by the rotational marking. She chooses a new colour—blue—and, on a new sheet, she makes a clockwise rotation. ‘Made his hat/ she says. Then she pauses for a moment, looking down at the drawing as if deep in thought. Then she makes three dots at the base of the rotation. These seem to be spaced with some care and precision. Everything becomes very quiet. Neither of us makes a sound. We are both watching in concentration as she then makes a quite new drawing combination. She makes a series of pull lines through a section of the perimeter line nearest her. These lines appear in a series from left to right, and each veers off from the perimeter line at approximate right angles until her pen approaches the section of the perimeter line where it increasingly curves away from her. She has made a new structure—the core and radial (Athey, 1990). This synthesis may have been prompted by her recognition of the dissection of the perimeter line by her slashes of the pen of just moments ago, or perhaps the idea formed when, in the previous drawing, she made a pull line at the base of the rotation. Note that this process is not the same as the one invoked in the Piagetian model, in which an initial accident, a ‘fortuitous’ mark, is then purposely copied. Here, we have a dynamic interaction between the drawing act, the child’s intentions, and their transformation in response to the structural possibilities she sees occurring. It is essentially a creative, thinking process—not one driven by chance. As Hannah makes the last of the lines to be attached to the perimeter line, she appears to make a deliberate effort to preserve its perpendicular attachment to this baseline. However, as she moves further to the right, leaving the core and radial structure, she makes a series of roughly parallel longitudinal lines. Microanalysis of the video recording suggests that it is at the moment when she attaches the last ray to the core unit, one or two options emerge for her. She can continue to attach her radial lines to the perimeter line at approximate right angles. This would mean that she adopted the rotational shape as the dominant landmark for her targeting and orientation of the lines, which would require a continuously monitored adjustment of her drawing so that the radial lines continue to depart from the core shape at right angles forming a type of core and radial, which I have termed a compass-array. This is in contrast to the other main type of core and radial in which rays are coordinated to overall horizontal and vertical coordinates rather than at individual, local perpendicular attachments on the perimeter line. These two different types of core and radial are illustrated in Figure 8, p. 28. (See also Matthews, 1994a, 1994b.) There are many factors contributing to whether the

CHAOS AND ORDER: DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS IN THE ART OF YOUNG CHILDREN

55

child produces compass-array or X and Y coordinated core and radial. Different orientation cues vie with each other and, depending on which ones dominate, so a particular structure emerges. In Hannah’s case, another structure with which she is concerned at this time is parallel grouped lines. This is part of the non-accidental property or invariant, which the child detects and recovers from the visual environment. These parallel lines will soon become true verticals. As we have seen, these emerge when lines are pulled toward the self whilst, after each stroke, the drawing hand is translated laterally across the paper. Perhaps it is this structure which competes with the right-angular attachment principle, making the lateral movement of her drawing hand and arm irresistible. Thus, though Hannah starts to make a partial compass-array form, this gives way to a reiteration of parallel verticals. Another reason that the parallel grouping dominates may be because there is an internal conflict between the desire to attach lines at right angles, and an awareness of lines moving out of vertical or horizontal coordinates, as they move around the core shape, either in reference to the self or possibly to the sides of the paper. Generally, the observations in both London and Singapore suggest that compass-array structure is a later development than X and Y coordinated core and radial (though many factors may influence the orientation of line attachment. (For a useful paper on this, see Gavin Bremner, 1985.) It is a later development because the child has to manage a graded calibration of ‘moments of turn’, successively increasing (or decreasing) obliquity of lines. This rather throws into question Piaget’s and Inhelder’s (1956) idea that, initially, the young child has a powerful local perpendicular bias and only later relates local attachments of lines to an overall Cartesian coordinate frame. My observations would seem to reverse this developmental sequence— at least in non-representational drawing and in circumstances when different sets of cues vie with each other, some of which occur on the drawing surface as powerful attractors. If, in addition, we cite the edges of a rectangular sheet of paper as additional competing cues, then we have introduced the notion that the young child does, after all, have some sensitivity to overall X and Y coordinates and it is this cue which the child has to suppress in order to produce the compass array (see also Matthews, 1994a). There is a level at which children explore shape and structure as of sufficient interest in itself. Maureen Cox (1992) criticizes Kellogg for her idea that children’s construction of core and radial (which Kellogg misleading terms ‘mandala’) is driven by an aesthetic sensibility. However, Cox’s criticism seems to be based simply on the idea that children’s core and radial drawings are not symmetrical. The mere absence of symmetry is not evidence of a lack of aesthetic sensibility. There is undoubtedly an aesthetic dimension to children’s drawing and other forms of expression: babies are probably born with an innate aesthetic sense (Chomsky, 1988). What Kellogg misses out of her account is that children gain aesthetic pleasure not only from shapes on the page—which they clearly do—but also from certain irresistible structures which move through time as well. The core and radial structure is an example of Second Generation Structure which is becoming a more abstract, generalizable ‘theme’. As with the other attractors, what are initially perceptual-motor responses go on to become interiorized as ideas or conceptualizations. The observation continues: Hannah then makes a push line longitudinally away from her whilst accompanying this ‘ascending’ line with an ascending musical vocalization —‘oooooooooo’. After which, whilst looking at the line, she says, ‘Made a tail—made —’. The representation of objects (‘tails’) may be the outcome of dynamic tracings of events. In this case she analogues the rising line with a rising song, which proceed together at the same rate or tempo and stop precisely together. Then she starts to count: ‘Two ones…’ Then she starts to count push lines as she produces them: ‘One, two, fourteen…’ Building on an earlier synchrony between action and vocalization, Hannah is counting her actions and the appearing mark. Although she has not yet interiorized the conventional sequence of verbal tags, in all other respects this is the beginning of counting; the one-to-one correspondence between action and an arbitrary, conventional numeron (Gelman and Gallistel, 1983). Hannah then dissects this line near its end furthest from her, making a near cruciform. She points to this conjunction and says: ‘Sitting on a lock… One two—one on sop’ (one on top). She is commenting on the relationship between

56

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

these two lines. Objects can ‘sit on’ each other in the two-dimensional world of drawing as well as in the external world. Hannah is perceiving a relationship between her drawing actions, and events and objects in the world. Increasingly, events which occur on the two-dimensional drawing surface will alert her to those relationships in the world. Note that the process starts this way around, from the drawing surface. Drawing and art are not copying processes. Rather, representation of the world is the result of active construction in various media and visual systems. Like many children, Hannah gradually extends the relationship between events on the two-dimensional surface with events in the physical world. Then she makes a pull line towards her, synchronizing the production of this ‘descending’ line with a descending musical scale— ‘ooooooooooo’. She finishes the drawing by making a little rotational marking over the centre of the blue rotation. So, two directional axes, which were initially discovered and practised separately in both drawing and dance, a rotational direction and an ascending-descending axis, have now been combined on the drawing surface. In both situations—those in three dimensions and those in two—Hannah synchronizes vocalizations which serve to underscore, emphasize and accentuate the quality and characteristics of the drawing or dancing actions. Electronic Paint So robust are these deep structures of visual expression and representation, they persist even through transference from traditional media to electronic media. In studies made by John Jessel and myself at Goldsmiths College, University of London, we found that very young children, who have barely begun to use traditional drawing media, use the same basic visual action structures to investigate the expressive and representational potential of the mouse-driven, microcomputer paintbox (Matthews and Jessel, 1993a, 1993b). In many ways, this device is very different from regular drawing and painting materials: the drawing surface and the display surface are adjacent but separate, and typically at right angles to each other; only a part of some drawing actions are actually seen on the monitor; electronic paint does not mix or run out; and the image is made not in reflected light from physical pigment but in light itself, on a textureless, depthless, glass screen. With electronic media, relative, and not absolute, spatial relations exist between the separate drawing surface and the visual display. Yet even with these and more differences, we find that children still use the same deep structures of visual expression. With both traditional media and electronic media, the child’s first priority seems to be to establish the causal relation between the actions he or she can generate and their resultant effects. We see children use horizontal arcs, pushpulls and rotational actions. Each time the same action pattern is transposed into a different medium some aspects remain essentially the same but other aspects are changed, offering the child new aspects and qualities inherent within the same structure. This interplay between theme and variation, when the same pattern of action applied to different media causes subtly different effects, helps the child build up understandings about structural variations. An inescapable difference between the computer paintbox and traditional painting is that actions occurring in the third dimension do not directly affect electronic painting. Hence, the vertical arc is quickly abandoned after a few experimental bashes. Naive adults too, encountering the computer for the first time, will lift the mouse and even tap it against the table. Like the children, they are attempting to find the causal relation between the marking instrument and the mark. Eventually, both children and adults learn the use of lifting the mouse in order to replace it in a different location to facilitate further drawing or writing. There are other important aspects about media change. Some ideas about children’s development in drawing and painting, which were thought to be absolute statements of a ‘universal’ development, turn out to be highly media specific. For example, it is often claimed that very young children cannot cope with many choices between, for instance, a range of different colours. Hence, advice is often given to teachers to limit the range of colours for very young children. Our studies of children’s selection and use from a palette of several hundred colours on the computer screen seriously challenges such assertions, showing that such ideas are not statements about a universal ‘stage’ of

CHAOS AND ORDER: DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS IN THE ART OF YOUNG CHILDREN

57

development but rather effects which are highly media dependent. Given the nature of physical pigments, in pots or palettes, and the child’s physical size in relation to these materials, it is no surprise that selection and manipulation from hundreds of physical pigments may be difficult for very young children (not to mention the daunting task for the adult to arrange the paints!). However, such practical problems do not exist with electronic paint; hundreds of colours can be arranged very easily on the computer screen. After a very short time, our sample of children were already showing abilities to select from these. At present, this microchip universe imitates the physical one. Perhaps, in the future, electronic media will move away from emulation of traditional media in much the same way that photography moved away from its initial imitation of oil painting. There is no requirement that the operation of a mouse-driven computer mimic causal relations in the physical world. Moving a mouse or stylus does not have to result in a trail of colour running along the same relative path of movement. Completely different, even bizarre effects, might equally be programmed (John Jessel, 1993, personal communication). We will return to these media differences, their uses and possibilities, later. Conclusion Children move through successive levels of structure which may be thought of as attractor systems. These attractors originate from muscular and sensorimotor responses to internal and external events but become interiorized to form conceptualizations or ideas. The attractors guide the child’s interaction with the world. The infant’s orchestrations of actions become templates for symbol use (Wolf, 1984), and aspects of the environment are transformed into expressive media. I have described drawing as a member of a family of interrelated modes. Drawing is a dynamic interaction between the child’s actions, intentions, and responses to the structural transformations he or she sees emerging. Children’s play is an essential part of a process through which expressive elements can be investigated as structures in their own right. It is through play that the infant achieves a ‘combinatorial flexibility’ (Bruner, 1972). We have seen how structures are carried from one medium domain to another, between two and three dimensions, and from traditional media to electronic media. Although the same or similar actions are performed on different media, the results offer structural variation which further enriches the child’s understanding of their expressive possibilities. Some ideas about children’s development in drawing and painting which were thought to be absolute statements of a ‘universal’ development, turn out to be highly media specific. The same basic categories of action are immediately modified and offer up structural variations when they impact with a particular technology of image-making, whether this be a microcomputer or a stick in the sand (Matthews and Jessel, 1993a). We can see from this that there is no such entity as a pure horizontal arc, vertical arc, push-pull or rotation, but that these are actions occurring through three dimensions plus the dimension of time which exhibit generalizable characteristics. Out of attractors which were initially generated and practised separately, the child makes combinations of forms. In the next chapter we look at the development of these new families of forms and hybrid forms.

Chapter 6 The Structure of Events and Objects

In this chapter we will see how the child forms visual representations about the structure of events and objects from investigations of the directional axes of movement: including, going around and around, up and down, going through passages or volumes, or going inside other objects. It may be, as Inge Bretherton (1984) has suggested, that internal representations of objects are derived initially from interiorized event scripts. In representational play, and in drawing, it appears that event descriptions lead to constructions of differentiated objects. From descriptions of actions, the child starts to construct the main axes of objects and possible views of objects. For example, the core and radial, derives from an elliptical circuit combined with single, straight-line journeys; or, another example, the cruciform cross-over and rightangular attachment, is derived from movements through two opposing axes. In this chapter, we will consider how the child builds up a more complex set of interrelated dimensions and axes and gradually constructs a visual and kinaesthetic description of space, form and movement. In the observation with which we ended the last chapter, we saw Hannah forming a combination of two structures, lines and rotational shape. Other important directions of movement are also developing. One is the movement up and down and through a vertical axis. Ascending and Descending Through a Vertical Axis The observations show that, from around 18 months, Hannah, Joel and Ben are discovering and investigating the vertical axis across a large number of situations. All three infants at this age mimetically represent up-and-down flight. As we have seen in the above observations, from 2 years of age, they are investigating ascent and descent in four-dimensional spacetime, and also mapping higher and lower relations onto the drawing surface. Hannah, aged 3 years 5 months 9 days, pushes the pen point along the paper away from her as she says ‘A cat…his head’s growing’, and then, as she makes the pen line move back towards her, says, ‘It’s going down again!’ Such drawings are partially derived from her new awareness of growth. Immediately after this ‘cat’ drawing Hannah produces another drawing. Once more, she makes a line move away from her toward the further edge of the paper, as she remarks, ‘The baby grow’d’. These drawings are essentially made from a carefully controlled and modulated push and pull stroke, in which the longitudinal axis on the drawing surface is conceived of as a vertical axis in the real world, and higher and lower relations are mapped onto the drawing surface. At 2 years 8 months, Joel is establishing higher and lower relations in a drawing on a used envelope. Here, as he marks a little tick on a part of the paper further away from him (higher up) he says, ‘a nose’, whereas, as he marks a part of the paper nearer him (lower down) he says, ‘a foot’ (Matthews, 1984, 1994a). Viewing an entire sequence of drawings made over the next weeks, we can see Joel making explicit this vertical axis. About one month later, Joel (aged 2 years 9 months 10 days) makes a series of upward moving vertical lines and says, ‘This is mummy, daddy, Joel and Ben’. (See Figure 5, p. 25, for an example of a roughly vertical, roughly parallel lines.)

THE STRUCTURE OF EVENTS AND OBJECTS

59

Over the next days Joel makes several other drawings of vertical parallel grouped lines. Human figures, along with other phenomena, have been assimilated (Piaget, 1951) into his understanding of the non-accidental property, or invariant, parallelism. These drawings usually represent the family group. Joel is interested in the essential axis of the human figures. In this group of figures, Joel wants to show their shared verticality. It is important to remind ourselves of the teaching implications in these drawings. As I have indicated earlier, whilst it might seem obvious to an adult that the highest part of a picture represents the highest part of the scene, and the lower part of the picture, the lowest part of the scene, this is not a foregone conclusion to the child. It is a pictorial convention, yet, as I mentioned earlier, it is not an arbitrary convention. It is related to information from the visual system, and from vestibular and proprioceptive sources, about the pull of gravity and our relationship to supporting surfaces. Much of this information is derived from the deceptively simple standing posture. In my view it would be quite mistaken to assess such drawings in terms of supposed deficits. There are people in art education, not qualified to advise on early years art, who are always eager to interfere with this development. A typical response to such a drawing would be to ask the child to put in more details about the human figure. To respond in this way to these drawings is as destructive as it is naïve. The child has not failed to draw a convincing human figure; rather he has discerned the underlying deep structure of the human figure, its verticality. Sometimes the movement along the vertical axis is more complex than a single direction; when a continuous rotation is translated along a longitudinal axis. The drawing of ‘bubbles going up to the surface’, which Hannah produces at 3 years 2 months, is an instance of this combination of actions. We have also seen how combinations of axes—for example, going around, and going up and down—are combined in play using the entire body in space and time. Rising and Falling Arcs Other ascending and descending trajectories describe a rising and falling arc. In playing with the marker’s trace-making effect, Joel encodes higher and lower relations in soaring, rising and falling, flights. One example was mentioned in Chapter 4 (p. 38), when Joel, at 2 years 5 months, moves a pen line in a rising and falling arc on the drawing surface to represent a flight-path. This is like the rising and falling arcs in his play with hand-held toy figures at this time, in which an object is made to imitate the behaviour of an object in a gravity field. Hand-held toys are made to fly upward till they slow at their point of weightlessness or apogee, and fall down again, accelerating until their impact with the ground. This representation of rising and falling in space is carried to and fro between two- and three-dimensional media and, through its transfer, offers up expressive variations. Both Joel’s play, of rising and falling arcs, and Hannah’s spiralling ascents and descents, are reminiscent of Joanne Chong’s play with the rising and falling, oscillating orbits of a hand-held toy (see p. 50). This flying arc is an important graphic structure. Its transfer to two dimensions means that higher and lower relations are mapped onto the drawing surface. Initially it is used to encode a trajectory of an object, but soon it comes to represent bridges, tables, hills and hats—many volumes which are saliently extended upward or outward into the air (see Figures 16, 17, 25 and 42, for examples). At 3 years 2 months, Ben sometimes uses a curving or arcing line in the same way as Joel, to describe the trajectories of objects up and down. Gradually, Ben uses this arc to represent, not the flight-path of objects, but certain objects themselves; objects which have an axis which ascends from, and descends again to, an implied baseline. One of these objects is a bridge. In one drawing, he attaches a configuration to the ‘upper’ part of this inverted U-shape, and says, ‘The train is going over the railway bridge’. A few moments later he reproduces the inverted U-shape in a second drawing, but this time draws a convoluted configuration ‘under’ the U-shape. ‘The train has crashed under the bridge,’ he says. The train itself is made of closures and U-shapes attached to a baseline. In order to render its crashed state he scrambles this configuration and combines it with energetic squiggles (see Figures 16 and 17, p. 39) (Matthews, 1994a).

60

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Knowing nothing about Ben’s drawings, Hannah, at 3 years 8 months 20 days, also produces a drawing representing ‘a bridge’. She says, ‘A train goes over the bridge, and water is under the bridge’ (see Figure 18, p. 39). She too has followed a similar route in mapping the relationships onto the drawing surface. Here, the underneath relations merge with another dynamic structure, that of ‘going-through’. Hannah’s inverted U-shape is more complex than the single-line structure, forming as it does a horse-shoe shaped, closed region. A single-line structure may represent the axis of an object, whereas a line used to circumscribe a region may capture the volume of an object, or its visible surface. In these drawings of bridges by Ben and Hannah, the encoding of higher and lower relations onto the drawing surface, is becoming explicit. U-shape on Baseline In these examples of inverted U-shape, an undrawn baseline is implied, upon which the shape is imagined to rest. A new structural principle is discovered when the U-shape is attached to a drawn line, forming ‘U-shape on baseline’. This very important Third Generation Structure is made possible by the realization of the relationship between two structural principles; right-angular attachment and closure. Micro-analysis of videorecordings of young children drawing show the moment when, after attaching a line to a baseline at approximate right angles, and allowing it to venture off into space, the realization dawns that the line may return to connect to the baseline. When this happens, a closed-off inverted Ushape on baseline is formed (see Figure 9, p. 28). Again, this structure is the direct outcome of considering actions in time and space. In representing the directional axes or vectors involved in these events, the child arrives at what I term proto-views. We will see this production of proto-views of objects and scenes many times, as children enact the main axes and passages of movement which run through events and objects. Good examples occur in Joel’s drawing and play. Around and Around, Up, Over and Down Joel, at 2 years 9 months 14 days, studies a milk-bottle top which has been depressed by an adult thumb to the extent that when placed upside down on a flat surface, it presents a dome-like appearance. Joel remarks on the folds which run down this hemisphere: ‘It goes down, down, down… ,’ as he runs his fingers down the folds. The he enacts a circular movement around the circumference of the milk-bottle top: ‘…a car goes round and round,’ (Matthews, 1984, p. 26). The drawing of main axes of movement has encouraged an exploration of the environment and the main axes which run through it and how these are combined. Joel now detects these directions across a wide range of terrain. This information detection, guided by acts of representation and expression, will form the basis of what has become known as ‘object-centred’ knowledge and ‘viewer-centred’ knowledge (Sutherland, 1973; Marr, 1982; Willats, 1985, 1997). Object-centred descriptions are not true ‘views’ of objects and scenes, but capture the main axes and characteristics of objects and scenes irrespective of any possible viewpoint. Viewer-centred descriptions, on the other hand, capture information about scenes obtainable from a particular viewing position, or station-point, and they specify this station-point. In the next chapter, we will consider in more detail, how these different types of knowledge are represented. In present observation, Joel detects and combines two main axes of the milk-bottle top, downward movement with a rotational movement. Two months later, at 2 years 11 months and 16 days of age, Joel is already mapping these main axes, rotational and vertical, onto the drawing surface. Now follows a description of a drawing I introduced in Chapter 4 (p. 31), when Joel draws a mountain (see Figure 31). On a holiday in the Lake District of Britain, I go for a walk with Joel up the rocky fells. When we return to the caravan in which we are staying, Joel plays outside, making hand-held toy figures go around and around, and up, over and down, large stones and rocky outcrops embedded in the ground. Later that day, Joel places a pencil eraser over a hole he has rubbed in a sheet of A4 size paper. Then, with a fine, black felt-tip pen he

THE STRUCTURE OF EVENTS AND OBJECTS

61

Figure 31

draws a continuous rotation around the eraser. Whilst he makes this rotational circuit, he says that the climbers are ‘going around’ a mountain, or ‘rock’ as he sometimes refers to it. Here, he uses a rotational shape to describe the climbers’ movements around the mountain, the eraser serving both as an axis for this movement and as a representation of the mountain. We saw earlier (p. 32) the use of an object (a paint pot) as a central hub, around which to orientate rotational drawing. Young children will also dance or move around a central axis, for example, Joel moves around the rocks in the caravan site. So far then, his continuous rotation is a familiar drawing scenario. His next actions, though, are quite surprising. He moves further to the right of the paper’s surface and enacts, with a carefully modulated and controlled movement of the pen, the climbers’ ascent up one side of the mountain and their descent down the other side. This results in an open triangle with the apex furthest from him. By enacting these events, Joel arrives at two possible configurations of the mountain. We are familiar with the first, rotational trajectory, which represents a rotational course around the mountain. The second trajectory is more unusual, in that its production requires the imaginative selection of the highest contour profile of an object not actually present. In enacting this trajectory he is utilizing understandings derived from play in which the movements of his hands over the highest points of large stones perhaps informed him of this axis. This inverted V-shape also derives from drawing rising and falling arcs and zigzags. In drawing this axis, he does not have an object to act as a template. By enacting this imagined contour, he arrives at a shape suggestive of a configurative profile of the mountain. Rather like Hannah’s clouds and rainfall drawing, this configuration is a by-product of an action representation. Joel has probably not purposely set out to depict the mountain from two fixed station-points. He arrives at proto-views of the mountain by mapping the main axes of the object, described by the climbers’ movements, onto the drawing surface, independent of any notional position relative to the mountain. An engineer might recognize the rotational shape as a plan of the mountain; the triangular shape as an elevation, as in an orthographic projection. This is a subtle distinction but an important one, as we will see when we try to untangle some of the problems of viewer-centred versus object-centred information. The shape and size of an object automatically suggest a position relative to the object, and therefore a view (Gleick, 1988). It could be that certain types of perception are elicited by different situations. With objects one can handle, or at least walk around, the perceiver may be able to detect structural invariants which remain constant despite transformations caused by the viewer’s own changing station-points. It may be that from such perceptions, ‘object-centred’ drawings are produced, which do not specify views of objects so much as their invariant structure. What happens, though, with objects which one cannot handle, and around which one cannot move—at least not so readily and quickly, like mountains? It may be that in the perception of such objects, a different mode of perception is induced, in which the object’s optical aspect relative to one’s own view point is revealed. This may be because there simply is no other way to

62

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

comprehend the object. Mountains and clouds are good examples. Think of how difficult it is to tell the true size and distance of these objects. Gibson (1979) was obliged to concede this. This type of situation may force perception of configurative aspects which may in turn elicit a ‘viewer-centred representation’. (I am grateful to Alan Costall, 1987, personal communication, for our useful discussions about this.) Experience of movements around objects will contribute to an internal representation or model of them, and it might be the case that Joel’s rocks and stones, around which he plays, are useful, miniature ‘toy’ mountains. Our perception and conception of the world changes as we find or make new technologies of image-making and new ways to explore these objects. In a jet plane, the form of mountains and clouds is, in some ways, better revealed than that from a walker’s point of view. How far these new technologies will fundamentally alter our understanding and representation of events and objects is doubtful, however. TV and photography, for example, despite some popular opinions, have not fundamentally altered the way children represent the world. The configurative profile of the mountain is so powerful that it prompts Joel to add to it the figures of two climbers. These stand on the left slope and are attached by a ‘rope’ (as he calls this line) which follows a course roughly parallel to the side of the mountain, ascending to the summit of the mountain and going down the other side. Having supplied for himself a new kind of drawing context or environment, he is quite able to coordinate additional elements to this. These human figures are not tadpole figures. One of the climbers has discernible body and limbs. Whilst he draws this figure Joel whispers: ‘There’s his body, there’s his head, there’s his knees…’ and he connects the climbers to the rope. As we will see many times, the tadpole figure, though important, is by no means the only type of human figure which young children construct. The type of figure constructed may be highly influenced by context, function or by linguistic interaction with adults or other children. Most observers have largely overlooked these alternative figure constructions; consequently producing distorted models of development. In Joel’s case, one of his very first human figure constructions has differentiated head, body, arms and legs—even knees! The overemphasized progression from tadpole to conventional figure obscures some important information about children’s drawing strategies and when and how children deploy these. Joel’s case is a good example. His drawing of highly differentiated microenvironments has prompted the production of complex differentiated humans who have been carefully fitted to this new, graphic terrain. Part of this new context is derived from the highly visible spectacle of seeing real climbers, in their brightly coloured anoraks and their highly noticeable ropes and climbing equipment, scaling the rocks all around. An interest in connectivity attracts him to the rope and the linked climbers. These striking visual phenomena may also make him aware of the function of arms, legs and bodies, even knees, in their supporting role in scrambling up the rocks. (3-year-olds are, after all, often painfully aware of knees—Joel was always bashing his.) Again and again we will see that the so-called ‘stages’ of figure and object drawing, with the obligatory landmarks of ‘tadpole’ and ‘conventional’ figures are products of adults’, rather than children’s, understanding. The Discovery of the Invisible There is another interesting aspect to this drawing suggestive of projective relations or viewpoints. Near the foot of the mountain are family and friends: ‘Daddy, Linda, Dominic and Ben, and cars waiting at the bottom,’ he says. Joel’s statement, made whilst he drew these elements, refers to the actual event of these people going climbing, leaving the car in the car park at the foot of the mountain. It may be that in drawing the figures going over the mountain and down the other side, he is also aware of the occluding nature of the mountain itself. This supports Lange-Kuttner’s and Reith’s idea that the apparent failure of children to imagine views in Piaget’s Three Mountain test may have been because this requires disruption of boundary lines. In Joel’s drawing, the contour of the mountain remains intact. Repeatedly, on these walks, Joel was made aware of how the mountain could conceal points of departure or arrival, and

THE STRUCTURE OF EVENTS AND OBJECTS

63

his representational play with toy figures, going up, over and down, or around the other side of large rocks may also consolidate this understanding. This seems to be supported by subsequent observations of Joel, beginning the very next day. Joel, 2 years 11 months 17 days, plonks a blob of white paint onto the paper. He then covers this with a blob of green paint. He says to me: ‘The white is hiding.’ Such observations can be traced back to ‘peepo’ plays between caregiver and infant; for example, Joel’s play, made some 20 years later, with his own daughter, Keira, which I described in Chapter 2 (see p. 12). In later infancy such explorations of line-of-sight, and occlusion are reinvestigated all over again with many different types of screening or covering materials, including pigments of various kinds, which facilitate superbly this understanding. In a drawing made at 2 years 4 months, Joel draws a little mark with a ballpoint pen and says it is a ‘boy’. Then he superimposes further marking and says, ‘Boy gone’. Now, just over a week before his third birthday, he re-reiterates this kind of representational play. Joel is physically ‘hiding’ the white paint with the green. Similar observations are made in Singapore. For example, Brendan, aged 3 years, superimposes a rotational patch of paint over an earlier patch he says is a ‘car’, saying the car is ‘underground’. Another 3-year-old, a girl, covers a mark with paint, saying that a man is ‘trapped underground’. Joel also encapsulates toy figures completely inside plasticine and talks about these people being ‘trapped’. In other observations, made in Singapore, children sometimes represent the spatial relationship ‘on-top-of’, by superimposing one patch over another. This is before they represent this relationship along a vertical axis. These latter examples have special significance when we come to consider the different ways in which children differentiate, in their drawings, between component parts of an entity, especially the human figure. Physical materials, including paint, demonstrate these relationships, on-top-of, underneath, and hiddenness by physical means. However, very shortly, these understandings are shifted to new conceptual levels in which further stipulations are made about the denotational value of lines to show occluding edges of shapes. When this happens, the child is not reliant on the physical capability of the medium to conceal. For example, only six days after Joel ‘hid’ the white ‘under’ the green, he demonstrates new procedures for imaging the concealment of entities one behind another: Joel, 2 years 11 months 23 days, draws an angular closed shape inside which he places a smaller, angular closed shape. He says: ‘There’s a duck under him… I think it’s a—a baby under that doggy… It’s an egg’ (Matthews, 1984). In this case, Joel uses the line of the larger closed shape to represent the edge of an opaque object (‘doggy’) which he imagines to conceal, by covering, the ‘baby’ or ‘egg’, represented by the smaller closed shape. The significance of this drawing is that whereas only six days earlier the physical nature of paint itself had physically concealed and hid an object, here the act of concealment is sustained solely by Joel’s imagination. He has to deny his perception and pretend that the smaller shape is concealed—covered by the larger shape. Furthermore, in doing this, he has to override a conflicting, alternative relationship which, unlike the over-under relationship, is actually visible—that of the smaller shape being inside the larger (Matthews, 1984). Lange-Kuttner and Reith (1995) point out that some developments in the understanding of viewpoint are built upon a new achievement of being able to ignore. This allows the child to selectively attend to some features whilst ignoring others. These writers also suggest that understandings of viewpoint may also be built upon the discovery of the invisible made in infancy (Lange-Kuttner and Reith, 1995). In these observations we see the child transforming understandings from their embedded state in actions and physical materials, to more conceptual understandings which require the attribution of new denotational values to lines and shapes. It might be, as John Willats suggests, that a major milestone is passed when the child uses lines to stand for occluding contours, rather than to describe regions. Such observations also show how misleading it is to consider such drawings as so-called ‘x ray’ drawings—the supposed result of errors in thinking and representation. According to this approach, the enclosing of the smaller shape is a mere mistake, ‘because one cannot see through objects’. Such an approach reflects the naivity of adult psychologists, not children. Joel’s penultimate act is to place the eraser over the triangular profile and then draw a continuous rotation around it. He chooses a different colour pen, as if maintaining the distinction between the two axes of the mountain, yet at the same time combining the two aspects. This continuous rotation accurately circumscribes the open triangular shape, its

64

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

innermost line precisely touching, at a tangent, the peak of the mountain. As in other observations, such great leaps in development may even startle the child him/herself. It may be that Joel is not ready to give up the rotational axis of the mountain. In the Singaporean studies, even when some children specify a view of an object, they sometimes cannot resist including some non-view-specific, topological information too. This may distort the view of the object they have achieved, but captures what the children feel is the essential structure of the object. Like these Singaporean children, Joel’s startling move in development is not sustainable at the present time. He does not produce, for at least six months, another drawing which shows this understanding of viewpoint. Nor does he produce human figure constructions with differentiated head, body, legs and arms. It is as if different experiences and understandings come together for an instant and ignite an understanding. The attractor of connectivity, alerts his attention to the climbers tied together on their rock closure. In addition, he personally has the experience of climbing, of ascent and descent. He represents this in representational play. In drawing, he can represent boundary, closure, going around, going up and going down, as well as connectivity. However, he does not possess, at this time, the conceptual scaffolding to build upon this experience; he can only reach toward it for a moment. We will see such sudden but short-lived leaps in development again, in which what is discovered is then temporarily lost, waiting for the additional experiences, practice and new representational strategies, to give it both the solidity and flexibility needed for inclusion within representational play. The mountain, and the activity of climbing, emerge as objects of interest at this particular time. Although representationally unsustainable, it continues to yield further symbolic play scenarios and representations for months, which eventually coalesce to form fuller descriptions of reality. We are looking at a family of attractor systems which converge on a certain objects which act like a ‘pivot’ around which representational thinking revolves and develops (Vygotsky, 1966). Two Axes or Two Views of an Object? It is debatable whether we interpret this drawing as showing two views of the same object, or whether he is showing axes of the object irrespective of viewpoint. As we have seen, this is not always a simple matter to interpret (Willats, 1985, 1995). As I have mentioned above, in effect Joel has produced an orthographic projection of the mountain. He has never seen such a projection, so its production cannot be accounted for in terms of imitation of existing models. It is essentially an original solution to an age-old representational problem. Even though these two configurations of the object are derived from event structures, I think we are justified in considering these as views of the object. This may be one way the child arrives at views of objects, as derivatives of action representation. In this mode, the child makes the actions and then perceives the consequences of those actions in terms of visual shape. This is what John Willats has described as the ‘interaction between production and perception’ (Willats, 1984, p. 111). This forms an important part of the ongoing dialogue between the child and his or her expressive and representational actions. It is an interesting question whether it is possible to conceive of the structure of an object without taking a notional view of the object. We will return to other drawings of contrasting views of objects and scenes shortly. In the meantime, there is one additional dynamic relation encoded into Joel’s drawing which remains to be described. Going-through The ultimate action he performs on this drawing is to push first his pencil, and then a toy figure, through the hole in the paper, in the centre of the rotational shape, to show the climbers going through the mountain! He is not yet able to project a space going back through the picture plane, so he represents this dimension physically and literally. This is the investigation of the dynamic structure going-through a bound volume (Athey, 1990). It is typical of children at this level

THE STRUCTURE OF EVENTS AND OBJECTS

65

Figure 32

of representation. My observations show that infants around this age do feel the need to encode this going-through vector onto the twodimensional surface. Poking a hole through the drawing or painting surface is often the first attempt to represent this relationship. Sometimes children will dance around the room peering through holes they have made in their drawings or paintings. Here is an example from the study of Hannah: Hannah, aged 3 years 5 months 6 days, is making a drawing in pencil. The movement of the pencil point emulates the movement of a ‘dancer’. She pushes the pencil right through the paper, saying, as she does so, ‘I danced through the hole and fell through. It has a hole in the other side…’. She considers her last sentence for a moment and then bursts out laughing and says— ‘It has to have!’ She laughs at this realization. Does going-through from one side to the other mean that there are two holes or one? These three axes, going around, going up, over and down, and going-through, also appear in Joel’s representational play around this time. Two months later, when Joel is 3 years, 2 months old, he plays with one toy figure in each hand and a coffee grinder. He makes these toy people pursue each other around and around, up and over and down the coffee grinder, and also descend through it, into the aperture into which the coffee beans are normally poured. As he explains, they go into ‘…a magic land far away’. Note that he uses the objectifiable properties of the object. The play reality is not disassociated from a world of objective properties shared by other people. Although temporarily uncoupled from the real world, it has a rich network of communication links to it (Garvey, 1977). Indeed, it is through play that objective properties of the world are fully identified, because, by freeing the object from normal adaptive constraints means that the player can interact with it in a multitude of new ways which recover information about the object. Joel shows an understanding of the occluding nature of the corners of the coffee grinder, around which one figure may hide from the other. As recent research has shown, the landscape of pretend play turns out to be surprisingly nonegocentric; the young child seems to show a clear understanding of what another person might see from a position in space not shared by the playing child (Cox, 1991; Hughes and Donaldson, 1983; Borke, 1983; Matthews, 1990, 1994a). Even though Joel can see both figures quite clearly from his point of view, he imagines what can and cannot be seen by each of the characters. He can coordinate imagined perceptions of imagined agents in imagined worlds as represented by toy figures. By skilful, fine manipulation, he adjusts the positions of each figure with respect to the lineof-sight of the other. For example, as, with one hand, Joel causes Figure A to disappear into the coffee grinder, with his other hand he adjusts the position of Figure B in order that this person can track Figure A’s descent. Frame-by-frame analysis of video-recordings of infants’ play with toy figures or dolls reveals an exquisitely orchestrated interplay of interrelated lines-of-sight which are coordinated into an overall scheme (see Figures 32 and 33). In at least the spatial, geometric sense, very young children are not locked into an egocentric state, as Piaget seemed to think (Piaget and Inhelder, 1951, 1956). These understandings of viewpoint, represented in the micro-world of representational play, will assist the child build up visual representations in other domains. We saw another, slightly more sophisticated play with lines-of-sight in Chapter 5 (p. 49), with the Singaporean child manipulating and viewing the spacecraft.

66

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 33

Figure 34

Figure 35

Soon children find ways of encoding going-through other than physically penetrating the drawing surface. Many children start to use the passage formed between two parallel lines as a route taken by a drawn element. Ben’s drawings of Father Christmas passing though chimneys formed by two parallel lines are good examples, or smoke passing though the nozzles of spacecraft, or even music going through a trumpet (see Figures 34 and 35). Singaporean children also used the passage between two lines and other shapes to represent the movement of objects going-through. It is tempting to think of the parallel pairs of lines in such drawings as representing another kind of edge or boundary —one that can only be imagined—a section. We haveto be cautious however. The child may initially move drawing actions through the physical twodimensional passage created by the two parallel lines on the paper. However, it is the beginning of an understanding that lines and shapes may represent an imaginary or sectional view. Further developments can be seen when Ben, aged 3 years 3 months, draws ‘a man digging in the ground for the bones of animals’ (see Figure 36). Here, a line demarcates the surface of the ground, upon which the man stands and below which are buried the bones of animals. Ben is transferring above and below relationships from the real or imagined world to the drawing surface. By utilizing the above-below relations afforded by the physical lines on the paper, his drawing has implications of a sectional view; that is, a view which can only be imagined. That above and

THE STRUCTURE OF EVENTS AND OBJECTS

67

Figure 36

Figure 37

below are important to him is further supported by the image of ‘bones of birds’, drawn above the man digging. Are these supposed to be in the sky, since this is where birds spend their time? When children use a single line as a baseline, upon which they place images of cars, figures or houses, they are also starting to accept the idea that this line may represent the foreshortened edge of a flat plane. When put into words, this might sound sophisticated, but its alternative—that they accept a line as a notional device to separate higher and lower, above and below—is even more difficult to accept. As Vygotsky (1966) has mentioned, in forming symbolic thought, the child does not operate at this level of abstraction. The projection of different views of objects is present in a drawing by Ben, at 3 years 2 months. He draws himself spilling a glass of milk whilst holding a slice of beans on toast (see Figure 37). We have, in effect, a face-on view of the flattish plane of his face, contrasted with the edge-on, totally foreshortened view of the beans on toast. Are these two views per se? Does Ben truly capture a ‘face-on’ view of a face, and foreshortened view of a piece of toast? It could be argued that Ben is trying to show the on-top-of relation when he draws the beans on the upper surface of the single line. Perhaps placing beans within a rectangular shape would have been ambiguous, suggesting that the beans are inside the toast. Are we looking, then, not at ‘views’, as such, but basic ways in which one may encode axes of objects? If the latter is the case, then this is another example of how the capture of non-accidental properties of objects simultaneously evokes a view. It turns out that these understandings are not mutually exclusive. Analysing the basic axes of objects often, as we have seen, arrives at possible views of objects. It is true that Ben has no way-yet of mastering a complete series of moments of turn from a 0 degree line-of-sight to 90 degree line-of-sight. He is, however, becoming aware that a single line can represent a foreshortened plane whereas a closed shape can represent a plane seen face-on. Such possibilities are present when other children rest configurations on baselines to represent houses, vehicles or people supported on the ground. The reason these possibilities may not be fully realized may be the want of appropriate interaction with informed adults.

68

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

It is worth mentioning that it is exactly this kind of understanding Piaget thought very young children did not possess. He showed children rods and disks completely foreshortened. Very young children did not draw a totally foreshortened rod as a dot or spot; nor did they draw a completely foreshortened disk as a line. From this, Piaget concluded that, ‘Children below four years of age have no perspective understandings worthy of the name and can be dismissed altogether’ (Piaget, 1956, p.176). Although Piaget’s use of the term ‘perspective’ is rather vague, John Willats suggests that Piaget mistakenly thought that very young children were incapable of conceptualizing a view at all, and so could not represent them. Lange-Kuttner and Reith (1995) feel that such a verdict is unfair, and that Piaget in fact thought that the basis of representation for the young child were perceptual images of the object. According to Piaget, what the child put on paper, were not necessarily the images obtainable from a fixed viewpoint. However, this seems to boil down to another way of saying the same thing—that very young children do not draw what they see! A way of restating Piaget’s position could be that the child does not conceive of the drawing surface as representative of one single percept, from one position in space, at one moment in time. This reconciles Piaget’s ideas with Willats’s work. Willats suggests that children’s difficulty in representing different projections of objects is not ascribable to some general incapacity to conceptualize about views per se. Rather, it is much more the product of the constraints and possibilities of the drawing medium, which the children have still to fully explore. Foreshortened Disks John Willats suggests that children’s difficulties in representing a totally foreshortened rod as a point, or a completely foreshortened disk as a line, may be because children do not feel that these would make for good representations of these objects (Willats, 1992b). Indeed, most artists, unless they have some special reason for doing so, also avoid such extremely uncharacteristic views of objects. Language may also affect the children’s decision-making; ‘dots’ are not ‘lines’, and ‘lines’ are not ‘circles’. Willats suggests that children do not have quite such trouble showing foreshortened discs—or flat planes generally—as they do foreshortened sticks (Willats, 1992b). This is because children do not have a ‘natural symbol’ (Stern, 1930) for a disk (or presumably for a flat plane), whereas they do have a natural symbol for stick. This would mean that children feel that though a point on a page is an unsatisfactory representation of a stick (because, by definition a point is not ‘long’), representing a disk as a line does not present quite such conceptual difficulties as there is no a priori representation to damage. I am not sure how strong an influence ‘natural symbols’ are on children’s drawing decisions, but my work supports the idea that children’s representation of a totally foreshortened disk depends whether children are distracted by another concern; that of showing the main characteristics or axes of the object. John Willats has argued that in order to represent objects visually, one must differentiate the object from its shape. Very young children may not do this (Willats, 1997, personal communication). The actual object depicted, and the context in which it is situated, can also have a strong effect on whether the child depicts disks as lines. Influenced by John Willats’s (1992b) experiments, I thought that, in certain contexts, children might be able to represent a disk as a line. Could they, for instance, draw a hat with a wide brim, with the brim foreshortened? In spontaneous drawings, very young children often use a U-shape on baseline to represent this and similar forms. In experiments I conduct with 2–5-year-old Chinese Singaporean children, I ask them (in Mandarin and English) to draw a straw hat of a type often seen in the Far, East. This hat has a conical crown and wide, circular brim. The experiment is divided into two main conditions. First of all, two children wear hats and the rest draw these children wearing them. Then, the hat is shown to children in two different orientations; firstly with its brim foreshortened, and then rotated through 90 degrees with its underside face-on to the children. The findings are more complex than Piaget’s. First of all, examples occur which fit into the idea that some children are trying to show in their drawings the most characteristic features of the object, or its main axes. There are signs that even some of the 2-year-olds do this, drawing elongated closed shapes perhaps to represent the brim, and making circular shapes and rotations to show the crown of the hat. This is especially true of those drawings made by the

THE STRUCTURE OF EVENTS AND OBJECTS

69

Figure 38

children who wear the hat. These children spend some time playfully manipulating the hat; holding onto the brim; sometimes lifting the hat on and off. Haptic information may supplement their awareness of the major axes of the hat. Some of the 3–5-year-old children combine the hat’s two main axes together, in terms of a triangular shape and a circular shape (see Figure 39). Other children use a straight line to represent the brim of the hat, confounding Piaget’s idea (see Figure 38). Possibly, what is happening is this, that whereas children think that a line cannot represent a circle, a line, in conjunction with a triangle, or U-shapes, may represent a hat. The key notion here is the child’s detection of main axes of the object. A line does not readily suggest itself as a characteristic of a circle, but a line attached to a Ushape or triangle do, together, capture the main axes of a hat. There are additional clues supporting the idea that children are recovering major axes of the object. Careful study of the drawing actions involved suggests how it is that a line may, in this context, be used to represent a disk. Some children, from 3–5 years of age, do show the brim of the hat as a line, but they may not be showing a foreshortened view of the brim. Rather, micro-analysis of their drawing actions, particularly at the points of attachment of these single lines on each side of the hat, suggest that they are trying to capture the protrusion or ‘sticking-outness’ of the brim (see Figure 40). Drawing the hat on top of someone’s head is especially complex. When children try to place the hat on top of the head, two main options seem to emerge. An interesting observation of Ee Ying Ying (5 years 8 months) will serve as an example. Firstly, Ying Ying does an exquisite drawing of the head inside the brim of the hat. The hat is composed of oval and triangle. However, even though she goes on to add body and legs to this configuration, she becomes dissatisified with it and erases the head, brim and body. She re-draws these parts, abutting the lower section of the unbroken contour of the brim against the top of the head, and then painstakingly re-drawing the figure. It might be that in the first drawing, though she succeeds in placing the head inside the hat, a reluctance to disrupt or occlude any of the boundary of the brim has the consequence of separating the head from the rest of the body. The dilemma here then is between different sets of information. If she places the head inside the hat, preserving the contour of the brim, this disrupts the coherence of the head and body. Her next version is like many other children’s versions, in that the underneath section of an unbroken brim just kisses the upper boundary of the head. In Ying Ying’s drawing, she occludes a small part of the

70

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 39

hair of the head by the brim, suggesting a sort of compromise between preservation of form and view-specific information. Figure 39 is another example of a child asking, ‘Do I put the head inside the hat, or the hat on top of the head?’ In the next condition the hat is not worn but held and shown to the children in two orientations, first with the brim shown completely foreshortened, and then with its underside facing them. In this condition, some children do show differences in the way in which the hat is drawn. Some children, after producing their first drawing which captures the hat in their usual way—triangle on top of circular closed shape—when presented with a new orientation, suddenly realize that a different drawing is required of the same object! Clearly flummoxed about how to go about this, they try to make a drawing which is in some way different, by adding something to their first drawing, or making a new drawing in a slightly different way. For example, some children add grid-like shapes (right-angular cross-overs) to show the texture of the straw hat, or add a human figure wearing the hat. In the edge-on condition, some children typically draw a triangle on-top-of an elliptical shape. Some children show the face-on view as two concentric circles, a smaller one inside a larger. With other children, the attempt to differentiate the two orientations manifests itself in the drawing sequence—the part they draw first varies between the two conditions. For example, in the edge-on position, some children start with the base of the triangular crown before drawing the rest of the triangle, whereas in the undersidefacing condition, they start with the two oblique lines of the triangle, and then add the circle in the usual way. Or else, in the second condition, children start with a circle before drawing any straight lines. In other cases, in the foreshortened condition, they simply spend more time redrawing and strengthening the baseline of the triangle. There are other cases, like Cindy Ng (3 years 8 months), mentioned above, in which, when the hat is held with brim edge-on to her line of sight, she emphasizes the baseline of the crown and even draws it as a single line, separately but parallel in one drawing (Figure 38). Fascinating observations are made in which other children, when shown the foreshortened view of the brim, do draw a single horizontal line. This finding is totally at variance with Piaget’s idea. Kai Neng (3 years 4 months) is a good example. After drawing the single line, he holds up his drawing and waves it at me. Significantly, he laughs at his drawing. Then,

THE STRUCTURE OF EVENTS AND OBJECTS

71

Figure 40

in actions typical of those few who do start with a single line, he adds more lines to it, forming a triangular shape with a smaller polygon attached. It may be that Kai Neng simply does not know how to combine the view of the crown with this view of the brim. However, I think that the reason for his laughter and his subsequent alteration of his drawing is that he does not find the single line acceptable as a representation of a disk. He feels obliged to add lines in an attempt to capture the coneshaped crown. John Willats (1992b) has also noted that children can sometimes represent views of objects, but they are not always satisfied with these. However, it is as if he also knows that his initial perception and representation of the hat’s brim in this position is after all the correct one, for he starts another drawing also with a single line, which he then strengthens by running his pencil ,firml y over it. I noticed other children when drawing the foreshortened view dithered and dallied on this line. However, once more it seems he feels obliged to add something to this single line and this time he turns it into an elongated oval. Note that this closed shape is significantly stretched along a horizontal axis, suggesting a compromise made between a single line and the circular shape, to represent the foreshortened brim. In Kai Neng’s two interesting drawings, it seems that a single line, though matching the child’s percept of the hat brim, does not map his concept of it. This may be why he laughs at his first straight-line drawing; it is as if he knows that technically speaking he is correct, but the resulting drawing fails to capture essential information about the hat; information he feels should be encoded into his drawing. In the first drawing he adds lines which suggest the shape of the crown; in the second drawing he modifies the single line into an elongated oval, suggesting the brim. Each drawing then, captures one of the two main axes of the object. It may be that he can draw a view of a foreshortened brim or sideview of a crown of a hat, but has not yet found a way of combining these representations in a way he finds acceptable. When shown the hat with its underside facing him, Kai Neng draws a circular closed shape into which he immediately draws a smaller, concentric circle. He then draws a fierce black spot in the centre of the smaller, enclosed

72

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 41

closed shape. Perhaps this represents the interior point or apex of the cone of the crown. Kai Neng is clearly aware that, in the two conditions, he is being shown two different views of the same object, which he tries to represent in his two sets of drawings. Figure 41, by Christopher, is an interesting example because, by enclosing the open triangle within the circular shape, he may be moving toward a new denotational use of line, in which the primary function of line is to show occluding boundaries rather than the shapes of the objects. The bottom ends of the open triangle may suggest an occluding boundary which merges with the brim (Willats, 1997). Movements Through Time and Space: Higher and Lower Relations, Going-through, Foreshortened Planes Figure 42 is one of a stunning series, made by Ben at 3 years 3 months, in which he coordinates all the axes and relations we have thus far discussed; movement through time and space, higher and lower relations, going-through, plus the use of structural innovation U-shape on baseline. Additionally, there is some intriguing view-specific information. Enclosing Volumes: Inside, Outside and Whereabouts Inside and Outside First of all, the house is a topological closure, possibly capturing the house as an enclosing volume, rather than a face of the object (remember my comments earlier regarding the temporary denotational ambiguity of the closed shape, see p. 56). However, he adds further stipulations to his earlier topological schema. In some earlier drawings, he simply encloses elements inside a closed shape; in still other drawings, elements of different characteristics are placed to one

THE STRUCTURE OF EVENTS AND OBJECTS

73

Figure 42

Figure 43

side or another, as ways of sorting or classifying elements. Now, he makes further specifications about where precisely these elements are located within the closure in relation to axes in the physical world. He demarcates the boundary line of the first floor by a line which laterally divides the closed shape in half, into ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’, to use Ben’s terms. We have discussed above the use of single lines to represent completely foreshortened views of flat planes. Although we have to be cautious about crediting this single line with true view-specific information—it may serve to simply divide higher from lower—nevertheless there are at least the inherent possibilities of representation of a foreshortened plane. Shortly, we will see other instances within this drawing, when totally foreshortened planes, curving and straight, occur. Movement Through Time and Space At the top of the drawing, Father Christmas has arrived, parking his reindeer on the roof. There are two depicted images of Father Christmas, yet Ben is well aware that there can be only one such person. Father Christmas is depicted in serialized form, moving through two positions in time and space, as he moves from his sled to the chimney. This is a development of earlier drawings, paintings and dances in which the repeated impact of the brush, or the clomping footfalls of hand-held toy figures, monitored spatio-temporal succession. The chimney is composed of two parallel verticals, part of the invariant or non-accidental structure, parallelism. Father Christmas is about to descend the

74

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

chimney, an example of the going-through relation. In other drawings (for example, Figure 34, p. 71) Ben shows Father Christmas in his passage through the chimney. Additionally, there are many instances of the use of the inverted U-shape on baseline. He can now deploy it to represent all manner of volumes, Father Christmas’s sack of toys, his hat, the bobble on his hat. The accretion of Ushape upon U-shape allows him to generate complex aggregates and towers (see Figures 62 and 67, p. 99 and p. 103, for examples). The inverted U-shape can now also be used to show higher and lower relations and sectional axes of objects. I noted above the fascinating use of the inverted U-shape to represent a table on which rests objects. I suggested that this form also implies view-specific information, in that it presents a totally foreshortened view of the table, akin to the ‘slice of beans on toast’ of Figure 37, p. 72. The U-shape on baseline can also represent sectional axes of other objects, for example, in the delightful reindeer forms in Figures 42 and 43. The reindeers’ antlers are interesting examples. By encoding their major axes, he arrives at possible views of these objects. Antlers could be depicted in different ways. They have two main axes: one is their prong-like aspect, which indeed he does capture in other drawings, for example, in Figure 43; the other main axis is their planar aspect. In Figure 42 he captures this latter aspect, showing the smoothly undulating planes of the antlers. Movement in Horizontal and Vertical Directions Horizontal and vertical directions are mapped onto the drawing surface. Father Christmas can move laterally along the picture surface, and also longitudinally down the surface, through the chimney, from outside to inside. If we include the projection of the table top (and other lines which possibly represent totally foreshortened planes), this means that, in this stunning drawing, three dimensions of space plus the dimension of time are coordinated on the drawing surface. Note that Ben’s closed shape does not capture Euclidean properties of houses. There is only one sharp corner, where the sweeping, all-embracing line circumscribes space and meets itself at an approximate right angle. This form is typical of children’s pre-Euclidean closed shapes. There are those people, including art advisors, who would wish to ‘correct’ this kind of drawing, suggesting to the child that he look at a ‘real’ house and take notice of the right-angular, carpentered environment. This is naïve and destructive advice. Ben is operating at a topological level; he wants to capture the enclosing, containing properties of the house as an entire volume. He is not yet interested in its Euclidean properties. Premature instruction into Euclidean geometry, reminiscent of Victorian drawing classes, still continues, with children ‘learning their shapes’ (as if Euclidean shapes were the only shapes). This is to the detriment of children’s development, because it interrupts and undermines a process already in train. Gradually, children will become interested in the rigid geometry of forms and, using sharp direction changes of the marker, start to make further specification about the particular contours of shapes. These early polygonal shapes are the result of the child gradually adding new information to the original topological schema. As John Willats (1997) has noted, even when young children draw rectangular closures (to represent, for example, houses), they may still be capturing volumes in their entirety, rather than views of objects. When children are helped to follow their own developmental pathway toward Euclidean geometry, it means that they can build upon, and retain, their earlier topological understandings of closure, boundary, hollowness and inside and outside. Young children also capture in their drawings the paths of moving objects, for topology captures not only the coherent boundaries of objects but also the shape of dynamical processes (Gleick, 1988). Interestingly, the only time in this drawing when he deploys right-angular structure is not to represent any carpentered object, but to represent an invisible action. The grouped parallel lines in a detail of Figure 42, represent the suction of the vacuum cleaner, wielded by Linda, his mother, at the moment in which it is about to suck up a piece of paper! This action representation is the only instance which he feels requires the powerful contrast afforded by rightangular attachment. The parallel grouped lines describe the movement of air and suggest the destiny of the scrap of paper. This visual description of an invisible action may be the basis upon which highly conventionalized

THE STRUCTURE OF EVENTS AND OBJECTS

75

representations, like ‘whoosh’ lines in cartoons, are used to show movement. This would suggest that there is a perceptual basis for the use and understanding of signs which are often presumed to be totally arbitrary. More research is needed here, but we can see that the child’s priorities regarding information to be encoded, and how that information is to be encoded, are different to those of an adult’s. Before we move on from this level of children’s drawing, another interesting example of this, and one which also revolves around the issue of arbitrary and non-arbitrary representations, remains to be mentioned. Emergent Writing In the drawings of the period from 3 years to 3 years 4 months, we see Ben using the drawing surface to encode information about the shape of objects as possible views, and the structure of objects from no particular viewpoint. However, during this same period, he encodes onto the drawing surface a quite different semiotic system—written language. Ben, like most other young children, uses the drawing surface for writing. Pictorial images capture physical characteristics and axes present in the object itself. The drawn form specifies to the human visual system the structure of the object. In written language, however, meaning is encoded on the drawing surface in arbitrary, conventional signs. In most written languages, there is no physical relationship between the word and the object it stands for. (I write ‘no physical relationship’, but this statement needs a little qualification with regard to some languages. I will return to this shortly.) With all written languages, one has to be taught the meanings of the signs, one cannot directly discern the object simply by looking at the written graphic structures and, what is more, this meaning has to be agreed by other members of the society’s language group. Words, then, are not direct representations of objects, but are really representations of representations (Meadows, 1991). Both words and pictures are generalizations about objects, but the forms of generalization are rather different. This is true even of those written signs which are a little like figurative pictures; shapes which still contain something of the physical characteristics of the objects they represent. Chinese Mandarin, for example, still retains something of its pictorial origins. However, even in the Chinese Mandarin character for ‘horse’, ‘M ’ (Figure 44), the figurative relationship has become highly notionalized and abstract. Moreover, this is a comparatively simple example; other characters for objects are even less straightforward pictures of objects, but are composed of different shape elements, or ‘radicals’, each one of which may represent quite subtle or abstract qualities of the object, or ideas.

Figure 44

However, the difference between visual representations and written language is not quite as sharp as some have implied. Chinese is an example, but sign systems which are less pictorial, more arbitrary, like the Roman alphabet, also interlock with the world in quite complex ways. It is simply not the case that the child immediately differentiates between words and pictures, as is sometimes maintained by some researchers of developmental writing. As I have written elsewhere, any differentiation children do make is probably different from that made by adults. Studying the beginning of writing and drawing shows that children are trying to sort how it is that objects, ideas, and the sounds which come out of people’s mouths, can all be represented in two-dimensional shapes on a two-dimensional surface.

76

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

The child tries to sort out the differences and similarities between figurative images and arbitrary, conventional signs, on the drawing surface; intermingling sign and symbol, blending them together, or stretching the way in which each type represents reality. This offers an expanded definition of what it means to read and write the world, for the first words are drawn, not written. And yet, very few researchers of emergent writing seem to realize the significance of the roots of writing in drawing (Stetsenko, 1995). We saw the beginnings of this with Hannah at 2 years 2 months, when she draws the sounds of her vocalization, ‘Baa, baa, baa’. It is as if she is writing from her own spoken dictation. Here, there was a one-to-one correspondence between action and sound, with perhaps the opening and closing of the action representing the opening and closing of the mouth or, in some sense, the shape of the sound. With later examples of emergent writing, the child tries to capture either the shape of individual letters or characters, either separately or in strings, like sentences, or the linear flow of handwriting. The production of written forms is influenced by the operant attractor system. Once the child has generated a certain form —say, closure, right-angular attachment, U-shape on baseline, or travelling loops and zigzags—then this alerts him or her to any new example of that structure within the environment. These examples may be physical structures the child sees or experiences; or they may be pictures of physical structures the child observes; or they may be written signs, words, characters and numbers the child notices within the environment. Drawing plays an important role in alerting the child to the existence of these forms within the visual and tactile environment. The attractor systems operate like searchlights which illuminate for the child aspects of the world in a systematic way. This is why letter, number and pictorial images flower at the same time on the drawing surface; they all share structural characteristics yet, intriguingly, they represent the world in different ways. We can see some good examples of letter forms in Ben’s drawing, as he tries to sort out the very different ways that objects and ideas may be represented on the drawing surface. In Figure 34 on p. 71, as Father Christmas comes down the chimney, from outside to inside, so Ben sleeps in bed. Ben is composed of a lower-case ‘b’—‘b’ for Ben. The lowercase ‘b’ is made from a single loop, a structure we will see reflected in other drawings. This sign for ‘Ben’ exists with equal figurative status as the figurative image of Father Christmas coming down the chimney, yet the mode in which Ben, the person, is represented is vastly different from the way Father Christmas, the person, is represented. Ben manages to fluidly combine the figurative with the arbitrary. Look how the closed shape of the ‘b’ rests on the closed shape representing the pillow. The physical closures of both closures are very similar, but the way each functions semiotically is very different. Ben brings them together in an ingenious way. The closure for pillow captures the enclosing boundary and volume of the pillow; but the closure of a lower-case ‘b’ represents no such physical volume, yet it rests on the pillow as Ben’s head! Both drawn and written structures are all examples of structures which the child recovers from the environment. Ben is capturing closure, right-angular attachment, and a spiral—like an ‘e’. Once these attractors are operating, they suck in all new manifestations from within the environment, whether these are objects or letter forms. In other drawings, the letters of his name are scrambled inside closures to represent ‘“Ben” in the house’. There is possibly a reference to ‘letters’ written to Father Christmas, too (see Figure 43). Again, there is a fusion between pictorial symbol and arbitrary sign with both modes enjoying equal status. In other drawings of this period, letter forms within another closed shape represent people in a house. This does not mean that the child does not differentiate between words and pictures, but that the way they do so is different from that of an adult. The ways in which these different forms of encryption both interact together on the drawing surface and with the world are complex and fascinating. The child purposely investigates and stretches the boundaries between different semiotic systems. The drawing surface is an arena that allows this to happen and is therefore essential to symbol and sign formation. Another example of the complexity of the interrelationship between configurative image and conventional sign occurs in Figure 45. The attractor here is the oblique junction of two lines. This 4-year-old Chinese Singaporean girl has used it both within a representation of a human figure, and also to draw, or write, the Chinese character ‘xia’ (Mandarin for ‘down’). To use Piaget’s terms, the child has assimilated to this schema, both human forms (the junction between arm

THE STRUCTURE OF EVENTS AND OBJECTS

77

Figure 45

Figure 46

and body), and the Chinese word. It might be that the child is thinking that the arms ‘go down’. Given the nature of the child’s agenda, these multiple associations are not only possible but also probable in very young children’s drawing and writing. Children notice different aspects of writing, depending on which attractor system is operant at the time. It may be that individual letters are attracted to graphic objects as in Figures 43 and 45, or it may be that the lateral, rhythmical linearity of some written forms, for example English, is assimilated to travelling waves, loops or zigzags. Both types of emergent writing are shown in Figure 46. In this drawing, emergent ‘hand-writing’ describes the ‘Fire Going Through a Spacecraft’. Ben (aged 3 years 3 months) captures the rhythmical linearity of English handwriting, rather than the discrete components of letters. It is very significant that within the same drawing, Ben deploys physically similar travelling zigzags for quite different forms of representation, to represent, firstly, the configuration of fire, and, secondly the written description of events in the drawing. In this latter case, the attractor here is the travelling wave or zigzag, to which can be assimilated, smoke and flames as well as words about smoke and flames. To complete this observation, another attractor, U-shape on baseline, has been used to form his upper-case ‘B’ — ‘B’ for ‘Ben’. Thus,

78

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 47

both action and configurative modes of representation, plus two forms of written language, occur within the same drawing. Hannah, also develops travelling waves, es and zigzags, and translates these laterally to capture the horizontality and rhythmicality of English handwriting. Hannah, like other children ‘reads’ her writing as she writes it (see Matthews, 1994a, for a full description). In these drawings, she considers the relationships between written signs and pictorial images—she ‘illustrates’ her written text with a semiotically different, pictorial configuration. However, children are quite happy to stretch the boundaries and distinctions they know exist. In Figure 47, for instance, Hannah, 4 years 10 months, changes in mid-flow from writing about a swan, to drawing a swan. She is becoming conscious of the ways these different forms of representation function. As the writing changes to a picture, she says,’…this looks like a swan… because…it is a swan’, meaning, it is a picture of a swan because it looks like a swan. In some of Ben’s drawings he intermingles letter forms and images in such a way that it is difficult to see which is which. The letter forms have become the furniture and objects within an environment which can only exist in pictorial terms. How conscious is he of these plays on meaning? In a drawing made a month earlier, ‘Six Boys With Flags’ (Figure 48), there are six boys, each carries a flag, and the flags are like ‘6s’ The attractor here is the single loop, a derviative of the travelling ‘e’ shape, described above. To use Piaget’s terms, he assimilates all new forms of this structure to this schema, and ‘es’ and ‘6s’ in the visual, literary environment are two interesting examples he has noticed. He has asked me to draw a ‘6’ in the top left-hand corner. He seems to be making multiple cross-associations between arbitrary sign and pictorial image: is this an unconscious crossassociation or is it a conscious, playful reflecting upon the nature of symbols and signs? It is hard to say, and perhaps one should be cautious about crediting the child with great skills of metacognition. Nye, Thomas and Robinson (1995) have argued that very young children may have difficulty holding in their minds double meanings about the picture as a real object and the picture as representation, so what appears as clever plays on meaning may be caused by the very lack of understanding of the multiple meanings involved. However, we can say that drawing forms an essential part in understanding the nature of symbols and signs. As I noted earlier, drawing is one member of an entire family of semiotic systems, a unitary yet non-homogenous group of processes (Stetsenko, 1995). There are important reciprocal interactions between drawing and other aspects of cognition, especially language. It might be, as Anna Stetsenko suggests, that drawing alerts the child to the dual function of symbols and signs: as structures in themselves; and as referents to events and objects beyond the drawing surface. Even more fundamentally, it might be that drawing owes its structure to language. More research is needed here.

THE STRUCTURE OF EVENTS AND OBJECTS

79

Figure 48

However, we can say that this is the forerunning experience for the gradual development of metacognition, the ability to think about thinking itself. We will see this more fully developed in later childhood and adolescence, when visual representation is used to reflect upon representation itself. Conclusion In this chapter, we have seen the main axes mapped onto the drawing surface. We have also seen other important relationships and invariant structures encoded into two and three dimensions of space, plus the dimension of time. We have seen that, as well as representing the observable characteristics of regions and objects within the visual field, the child also represents the non-visible, invariant or non-accidental structure of objects, scenes and events. We saw that in recovering the main axes of objects and events the child also arrives at possible sections or views of objects. Additionally, the child’s use of visual media is a complex and fluid interplay with representational structure and the ways in which it interlocks with events and objects beyond the drawing surface. Coupled with this, the child also investigates graphic and dynamic structure as an entity of interest in its own right. The child begins to differentiate, and exploit, for expressive and representational purposes, a family of semiotic systems, including pictorial images, numbers and writing.

Chapter 7 The View from Nowhere

As children grow older they feel the need to make further specifications about the objects and events in their drawings. They also become more aware of the systems in which visual representation is encoded. Sometimes, in trying to capture the information that they feel essential to be encoded in a work, they produce drawings, which appear strange to some adults. This chapter will show that, nevertheless, these seemingly odd-looking drawings are the result of legitimate and powerful approaches to visual representation.

Figure 49

THE VIEW FROM NOWHERE

81

Intellectual Realism and Visual Realism Many people’s understanding of children’s drawing development has been heavily influenced by a theory derived from a hybrid of the ideas of Jean Piaget and those of French theorist Georges Luquet (1927). Luquet was a sensitive observer of the process of children’s drawing who made important discoveries about its nature. Luquet noticed and described four different modes of drawing emerging in childhood. The first mode he called ‘scribbling’ (he does not appear to have considered this representational, but pure motor-play), the second mode he named ‘fortuitous realism’, in which children are thought to notice, remark on, and purposely reproduce, accidental—or ‘fortuitous’ —visual likenesses appearing in their ‘scribbling’. I noted earlier (p. 19), that this is a very unlikely mechanism of development. Two later modes he called ‘intellectual realism’, drawings which capture the basic structure of the object but not from any fixed viewpoint, and ‘visual realism’, which captures the shapes of objects or scenes as if from a fixed station-point. Piaget recast the drawing modes identified by Luquet in terms of a hierarchically tiered system in which, through maturation, the child was supposed to progress through these modes, from meaningless ‘scribbling’, to ‘fortuitous realism’, to ‘intellectual realism’, and finally to the supposed goal of ‘visual realism’. In fact, Luquet never intended his identification of drawing modes to be translated as a ‘stage’ theory. Luquet argued that intellectual realism was not a deficient system compared with ‘visual realism’, but a different, yet equally legitimate mode which captured information important to the child (Costall, 1995). Luquet thought of all representation as acts of construction, rather than depiction (Lange-Kuttner and Reith, 1995). Piaget’s original theory of drawing development was also more complex than the way it is sometimes interpreted nowadays. The division between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ was not the simplistic dichotomy it has now become. Piaget thought that perception was a different cognitive process from representation. He considered vision to be a dynamic process in which the act of perception transformed the object. According to Piaget, it was the changing interrelationship between perception and cognition that was the mechanism behind the development of visual representation (Lange-Kuttner and Reith, 1995). Unfortunately, over time the complexity of both Piaget’s and Luquet’s original theories have been reduced to a conventional wisdom that usually takes the form of a generalized ‘stage’ theory. In this ‘stage’ theory the child is thought to progress from supposed inferior to supposed superior stages of representation. In its most diluted state, the idea is that when children draw ‘intellectually realistic’ pictures, they are supposedly drawing ‘what they know rather than what they see’. Finally, children are supposed to overcome the supposed limitation of their intellectually realistic thinking and move on to the stage of ‘visual realism’, when drawing ‘what they know’ is replaced by drawing ‘what they see’. When we study the recent research in children’s drawing, we find we have not really moved far from this reading of the Piaget/Luquet model. Much recent British experimental psychology, for example, reinvestigates the notion of intellectual and visual realism but still fails to question its underlying assumptions. The dichotomy between intellectual and visual realism is accepted by many contemporary psychologists as essentially truthful and development is assumed to be a linear path towards ‘visual realism’ (Freeman and Cox, 1985). These authors merely recast the theory in David Marr’s terms of substituting object-centred for intellectual realism, and viewer-centred (or view-specific) for visual realism. Derived from ideas of Marr (1982) and Sutherland (1973), an objectcentred depiction captures the main axes and characteristics of the object irrespective of any particular viewpoint. It is a visual idea about the structure of the object, not about a view of the object. A viewer-centred depiction is one in which the object is shown as if seen from a particular station-point; that is, as if it is a view of the object. Putting to one side earliest mark-making or so-called ‘scribbling’ (which is rarely, if at all, studied), then the drawings of very young children are still divided into two types. One kind supposedly conveys what children ‘know’ about an object or scene; and another kind supposedly shows what they ‘see’. In some theories behind much recent research, we still encounter a ‘stage-like’ progression from object-centred to viewer-centred depictions, as children supposedly overcome the severe limitation in their abilities and manage to draw objects as they ‘really look’. As Alan Costall explains, other theorists adopt a more democratic attitude, suggesting that the child has available a range of options and that specific contexts will elicit one or other response (Costall, 1995). Using ingenious experiments, situations are

82

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

contrived which focus the child’s attention on how the objects appear from his/her viewpoint. The intention is to prompt the child into overriding his or her intellectually realistic tendencies and show view-specific understanding. The idea here seems to be that special contexts will tease out the view-specific strategies from their concealment beneath a usually dominating intellectually realistic mode. Although these researchers claim to offer evidence of a clear-cut division between object-centred and viewer-centred, Alan Costall (1995) has commented that there is no clear way, in many of these experiments, of classifying the drawings produced by the children. Additionally, he points out, since very young children rarely draw from objects in front of them anyway, the findings of much experimental work are skewed to start with. Costall (1995) argues that what is needed is a developmental account of how children move from encoding object-centred information to view-specific information. As I mentioned above, in practice, it is often very difficult to know whether to ascribe view-specific or objectcentred information to a drawing. John Willats suggests that, in a young child’s first drawings of objects, the enclosing line of a closed shape may represent the entire volume of an object, rather than a view of the object. He describes a child’s drawing of a dice in which the child draws all the spots in a single rectangular shape (Willats, 1987, 1992a). Vanessa Moore (1986) describes children drawing a cube which has differently coloured faces. She notices how some young children draw this as a single rectangle in which all the colours are rendered as stripes. Willats suggests that such strategies mean that the children are trying to capture the topological, enclosing volume of the objects, rather than views of the objects. However, it seems to me that the findings of these studies are ambiguous. The nature of drawing processes in the early years allows children to change from one approach to another, from one moment to another. There is no reason why one should imagine that the denotational values of the lines have a fixed meaning. In a recent study by this author (Matthews, 1998, forthcoming), when children between the ages 2 years 7 months and 6 years 1 month were asked to draw a cube which had either differently coloured or differently patterned faces, only 1 child, Si Hui (5 years 9 months), one of a total of 50 children, drew the cube as a single square shape in which all the patterns were enclosed, in the manner described by Willats and Moore. The other children produced many different approaches to the encoding of the structure of the cube, including multifaceted configurations, of the kind often referred to as ‘object-centred’, in which children seem to be combining the different faces of the cube, forming a kind of drawing mathematicians might refer to as a ‘net’. Many other types of representations were not discernible in the finished drawing, but they could be identified in the drawing actions, as processes of representational thinking unfolding in time. Of significance is the finding that, although many of the children initially represented the cube as a single square, they seemed dissatisfied with this solution and went on to make further drawings, using representational modes quite unlike depictions, in the usual sense of the term, yet which for the children captured the structure of the cube. It seems likely that Si Hui, after drawing the single square to represent the cube, had then to decide where to place the individual patterns. The child might have thought that the patterns should not be placed outside the shape, so superimposed them, one after another, inside the shape. Though this could be interpreted as meaning the child is using the enclosing square shape to represent the entire volume of the cube, it seems just as likely that the child thinks in an episodic way, not conceiving of the drawing as representing a single percept of the object, but moving from one decision to another in time, and adhering to the idea that the patterns must be placed inside, and not outside the enclosing square shape. Drawings often seem to contain a mixture of ‘view-specific’ and ‘object-centred’ information (Pratt, 1983). Consider the drawings in Figures 50, 51 and 53, made by Singaporean children average age 4 years 9 months, and Figures 49, 52 and 54, by London children between 3 years 3 months and 6 years. The Singaporean children are asked to represent their families around a table. Some of their drawings are produced from imagination, whilst some are drawn from toy tables with toy figures around them. Are Figures 50, 51, 52 and 53 best described as ‘object-centred’, or ‘viewer-centred’ or as a mixture of different types of information?

THE VIEW FROM NOWHERE

83

Figure 50

Figure 51

In Condition 1 of this experiment, when the children are drawing their families sitting around a table from their imagination, most children draw descriptions of the array which seem to capture the main axes of the scene irrespective of any particular view point. Many of their drawings show the main axes and structure of the scene in ways that might be characterized as ‘object-centred’. However, such drawings are not restricted to object-centred information, some aspects of the drawings seem to convey viewer-centred and other modes of visual organization too. In Condition 2, when they have objects to refer to, at least three children seem prompted to capture some view-specific information. but other children make other kinds of changes in their second drawing. Apart from three cases, these changes are not toward viewer-centred descriptions; rather, object-centredness is even more strongly emphasized. Visual analysis of the scene plus, perhaps, analysis of the adults’ suggestions, are translated into an object-centred, rather than viewer-centred, layout. Some of the information may be termed ‘object-centred’ information (Sutherland, 1973; Marr, 1982). In Figures 50, 51 and 52, the children draw the table as an approximate rectangle. They are trying to preserve the main axes of the object, the two sets of parallel sides, the right-angular corners. Additionally, the legs of the table are shown in perpendicular relationship to the edge of the tabletop that acts as a baseline. Similarly, the backs of chairs have been constructed along longitudinal axes that run through them and which are attached at right angles to the edge of the table. The legs of the table are attached in some cases at right angles to one or other side of the table. Human figures, when these are present in the drawings, are often built around these basic axes which run through their different

84

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 52

Figure 53

components. Hence, a longitudinal axis is conceived as running through the trunks of the figures and this axis is then associated to the edge of the table at right angles. Similar strategies appear in a 6-year-old Londoner’s drawing of horses in a field (Figure 49). This endearing drawing attempts to capture the main axes of a scene containing several objects. How do you draw horses in a field? This child seems to have systematically tried every possible approach, ending with a final image of the horse seemingly doing fourlegged splits against the ground! Here, the device used is similar to that used by other children to draw tables. A horse has been assimilated into a structure that, like a table, is essentially an object with a leg sticking out at right-angles from each of four corners! John Willats (1997) notes that drawings initiated from object-centred descriptions might result in possible views. Drawings of houses like Figure 74 may have started off as such an object-centred description, which has had a new shape, representing the side wall, added to it (Willats, 1997). Another example is Ee Ying Ying’s drawing (Figure 50) in which she shows a cake with candles, drawn at right angles to the line representing the surface of the cake. Is this objectcentred or view-centred? Although the drawing of the cake presents a view of the cake, it could equally be categorized object-centred, in that it captures main axes of the object. Candles run at right angles to the surface of the cake and transparently overlap the shape of the cake, presenting a view of the cake, but this could equally represent the insertion of the candles. Another way of describing the drawing of the cake is that it captures invariant information about the structure of the object, and that some structures are apparent to the visual system in the real world. Another example is the drawing of the hat with brim described in Chapter 6 (see pp. 73–7).

THE VIEW FROM NOWHERE

85

There is an aesthetic aspect which influences the way children design their drawings, but this involves the child’s awareness and sensitivity to the temporal succession of drawing procedures, not just the finished product. It may be that children carry over to the representation of objects, understandings of structure based upon horizontal and vertical coordinates developed in their non-representational drawings. Sometimes, this Euclidean geometry spreads into the children’s construction of human figure as an object in itself. This accounts for why some children attach images of people at right angles to sides of the table (see Figure 51). In some of the figures/tables drawings entire figures are drawn, even though viewspecific criteria would necessitate the occlusion of their lower bodies. One of the difficulties children have in showing before and behind, or in front of and behind relationships is that they are at a level of topological understanding which makes them reluctant to discontinue lines and shapes that they know in reality to be continuous, intact, coherent wholes. We have seen other examples above, when children draw sausage shapes and spheres, or wire and clay tadpole models, that they sometimes sacrifice the shape, in order to preserve the continuity of the line. These and other examples help to explain some of the so-called ‘errors’ in children’s drawing, some distortions are unavoidable if essential information about the topological continuity of contour and the coherence of entities is to be preserved. It is not that they do not consider the shape of surface contour unimportant, rather they think the main property of a surface is that it should remain unbroken. In Chapter 4, I noted instances in spontaneous drawing in which children will show occlusion and hidden line elimination if this does not disrupt the shape of objects (see pp. 46–7). For example, Bevan is happy to draw one of the nearer table legs whilst omitting the further ones, perhaps because in doing so he does not violate these shapes. It is the partial disruption of a boundary line which is the problem, but to make these shapes completely visible or completely invisible is allowable. The principles which guide these decisions are complex, however. Campbell, at 4 years 7 months, occludes figures from the waist down (see Figure 51). For this child, perhaps the occluding table edge is a highly salient dividing line, like the edge of the skirt is for other children (for example, Figure 28). Goh Zhen Ying (4 years 8 months) is able to sacrifice the continuity of figures in order to show occlusion and view point (see Figure 53). In a series of images made on the same page we see him moving from object-centred descriptions to viewer-centred in a thoughtful sequence of steps. First of all, on the left, there is an object-centred table; under that, a table which may be a view of a table from one side. He seems to have omitted ‘far’ legs of the table in order to show that the table is being seen from one side. He has also drawn the four chairs, on the lower side of the rectangle, possibly intending these to be represented as in front of the table. These may be intended to be back views of people, occluded but for their heads, by the chair backs. This would support the idea that he is trying to show a view of a table. Perhaps he is unhappy about not being able to include the objects on top of the table. The issue here for the child who can show in a single drawing, topological, Euclidean, and some before behind relations, is how and where to situate the objects in relation to the surface on which they are supposed to be resting. To place them inside the polygon might produce an unwanted inside relationship, disrupting understandings made so far about on top of relations. To place them on the lower line of the table, radiating outward and downward, according to an object-centred strategy, no longer satisfies him either. Perhaps because of this dilemma, he draws an additional side view of the table, using a developmentally earlier higher and lower scheme. This allows him to place objects on top of the table. Again, he places the chairs ‘in front’, that is to say, physically below the table configuration. However, something still seems to bother him. He draws two more versions and, this time, both seem very clearly influenced by his particular station-point. These drawings are the ones towards the upper right (Figure 53). In the image on the left, Zhen Ying again uses a pair of oblique lines (which, if continued, would converge) standing for the orthogonals of the table, as he did in his first effort. He places a half-occluded figure at the ‘far’ end of this table. In the drawing to the right of this, he bravely tries a foreshortened ‘view’ of the table, with the nearer figure shown from head to toe, so to speak, and the further one occluded by the edge of the table. Note especially how he tries to show the far legs of the table, emphasizing that they follow the same vertical direction as the front pair. All three figures sitting at the tables have down cast expressions. Who knows, perhaps this reflects Zhen Ying’s sadness at this difficult task.

86

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 54

These drawings are interesting, because they tell us how an individual, at a transitional phase, is trying to reconcile different types of information. One type derives from object-centred knowledge; the other derives from viewer-centred information. Different sorts of invariants are derived from different kinds of knowledge and the problem is to unite them on a two-dimensional surface. Zhen Ying’s new drawings entail radically revising the spatio-representational meaning of directions on the drawing surface. We have seen that the theory of object-centred depictions allows representations which are not true views of the object, in the sense that they do not present information obtainable from a fixed station-point. What is not clear in the literature is whether the theory intends the object-centred representation itself to present information as a ‘view’ (albeit of a new kind), or whether information may be encoded in ways that do not encourage easy recovery of the visual structure of the object. The literature is divided on this. In some accounts, object-centred pictures are described as giving information independent of viewpoint; but although they are not strictly speaking views, they do present a visually coherent object to the viewer. Some of the ‘object-centred’ figures around a table drawings create, if not true views of people and tables, then at least images visually recognizable as the representations of these things. Other examples are more like the illnamed ‘fold-out’ drawings, and it is not easy to always say whether one is seeing the structure of the object in itself, or a multiplicity of views of the object. But there are still other drawings that truly capture information about the structure of the object, but which are a good deal more tangled and ambiguous. Consider, for example, Richard’s drawing (Figure 54). Richard is 6 years old when he draws, from observation, this representation of my bicycle. Though we can make out certain features about the object, wheels, frame, cogs and chain, one feels doubtful about claiming that what organizes this description is an interiorized, object-centred description, in the sense that the term object-centred was originally intended, as an internal model of reality. One feels uneasy about crediting this drawing with capturing the main axes of the object. Rather, what links these elements together is not so much an interiorized, object-centred system, but the line itself. We accept that the child has not considered the drawing as having geometric relations to a single optical array as seen from a notional, fixed position in space, but nor has Richard considered the drawing surface itself as a totality, to be apprehended and comprehended in an instant. John Willats describes the development of drawing in terms of the child learning increasingly complex drawing rules. However, it can also be described in terms of the child’s own unfolding agenda driven by the attractors. This means that the child will be attracted to certain forms and relations in the environment rather than others, in a sequence related to maturation. The search for these structures is not focused on the representation of the object in two dimensions, but on the structures in themselves. Richard’s bicycle is a good example. It is composed of a mixture of Second and Third Generation Structure: closure, parallelism, concentricity, connectivity and travelling zigzag. He is also becoming

THE VIEW FROM NOWHERE

87

Figure 55

sensitive to angular variation. He finds these structures in looking at the bicycle. So his drawing is not best or completely described in terms of an object-centred description, since these should contain the characteristic axes of the object. That drawing development is related to the discovery of drawing rules is part of the story. However, that way of accounting for development focuses entirely on the object and the problem of its representation. Richard is producing Second and Third Generation Structure and his search of the environment is directed by these attractors. They unfold on the paper in relation to what he sees in the object but he does not only represent the object, but the process of search itself made in relation to the design constraints of the drawing medium. Hence we have to also acknowledge a level of drawing-centredness in children’s visual representation. Linda in Dungarees Many drawings produced in childhood are mixtures of different kinds of understanding linked fluidly onto the drawing surface in an unbroken chain of thinking. An interesting example is a drawing mentioned in Chapter 4, p. 42, which Ben makes at aged 3 years 2 months (Figure 56). The subject of the drawing is ‘Linda in Dungarees’. When Ben draws this, he is sitting at the kitchen table, looking up from time to time at Linda as she stands near him. She is wearing dungarees. The entire figure is drawn along a vertical axis, with the head at the top. We can see the observable contours of her body, her breast, waist, thighs, her behind, as well as the straps of the dungarees. I have discussed this drawing elsewhere (Matthews, 1984, 1994a), but at this point it is important to note that to represent this human figure Ben uses the structures he has been generating from about 2 years 10 months; roughly parallel lines, closure, right-angular attachment.

88

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 56

The roughly parallel lines are used to show contours of her body plus the straps of her dungarees. In the case of the lines used to show the straps, these represent thin pieces of denim. This is similar to the denotational use of single lines to represent other longish items, hairs, rods, legs etc., as uni-dimensional elements. These lines are elements that represent physically tangible entities. For example, we could perceive these as elongated elements by touch alone (Willats, 1990, personal communication). However, a physically similar line is used to show a quite different entity, one that cannot be perceived by touch but is a temporary phenomenon dependent upon the artist’s station-point relative to the scene. It is an occluding boundary, a visual boundary rather than a physical boundary. Although topological information about a physically undulating form may influence his drawing, I am sure that most of its information derives from visual information based on his purposeful observation of Linda standing next to him in the kitchen. This possibility is strongly supported by his drawing actions; he repeatedly looks back and forth between his drawing and Linda, whilst he draws. The drawing of Linda in dungarees seems to show two aspects of the figure, a profile and a front view which have been combined together. We can pose the same question as that posed above, in relation to children’s drawings of people around a table, and other objects and scenes. Is it best to describe this drawing in terms of two or more views of the object combined together, or are we seeing the result of the child mapping the invariant characteristics of the object onto the paper? It is probable that both tactile and optical information are involved, plus knowledge deriving from linguistic sources. This goes to show how difficult it is to neatly classify drawings into either visual realism or intellectual realism. Sometimes, apparent ‘object-centred’ representation could be the result of the child thinking in an episodic way about the object, linking further aspects of the object to the previous shapes as the drawing unfolds, and seizing the

THE VIEW FROM NOWHERE

89

structural opportunities as they arise. Some examples are really event structures (Wolf, 1984). Ben’s ‘Boat Taking Off Out of Water’ (Figure 61, p. 99) drawn at age 3 years 4 months is one such in which there is episodic visual narrative, neither primarily object nor viewer-centred. This may be the case with many apparent object-centred representations. Conclusion We can conclude that the theory of object-centred and viewer-centred descriptions is still useful but needs reviewing and modifying. Children do spontaneously pick up information we might term object-centred and view-specific, and we have seen some children moving from the encoding of former to the encoding of the latter; for example, in the drawings of Zhen Ying and Ben. One reason children make object-centred descriptions may be because they have not conceived of the drawing surface and the images and the structures which appear upon it as representing a single image or percept of a scene within a single moment of time. The process of drawing itself will gradually alert the child to this possibility. I am not suggesting that the viewer-centred approach is somehow superior to the object-centred depiction. Nor am I saying that viewer-centred depiction is somehow less conceptual, or less ‘intellectual’ than the ‘intellectually realistic’ or objectcentred mode. Lange-Kuttner and Reith (1995) are right in saying that ‘visual realism’ is another form of intellectual realism. In the object-centred mode there is no viewer and no view, whereas the viewer-centred mode encodes invariant structures whilst conveying the idea of a possible view. Some apparent views of objects may arise from a quite different type of representation, which I have termed action representation. Some action representations are about the recording of the trajectories of objects or the unfolding of other events beyond the drawing surface. In a deeper sense, many drawings, especially by young children, are action representations because they are recordings of a process of interaction between the artist’s thoughts and feelings in relation to the unfolding events on the drawing surface. It is unusual for very young children to sit still and look fixedly at a particular scene or object in order to draw it. With few exceptions (for example, Pratt, 1985) the majority of researchers investigating how children draw objects from observation never acknowledge this. Although many researchers assume that drawing from observation is perfectly natural, this is not so. It is part of a particular approach to representation and involves special art praxis. In order to draw from a representation of an object as if from a general direction of view, one has to ignore many of the fluid transformations taking place on the drawing surface and hold in mind a conceptualization or representation of the object as a still image, towards which the drawing is planned to move. The categorizations of objectcentred or viewer-centred are quite helpful as starting points in considering how children represent objects in the physical world but, in many of the drawings we will consider, drawing is only tenuously connected to the external world. We have noted that children rarely draw from objects set before them. As Arnheim has noted, drawing is not about the representation of objects per se, but is an interplay of forces within the process of drawing itself (Arnheim, 1954). In addition to object-centred and viewer-centred modes we have to acknowledge another mode, a drawing-centred mode, in which the child takes advantages of the structural and representational possibilities which accrue on the drawing surface, and designs the object with reference to this drawing surface (Costall, 1990, personal communication). Part of what happens when children start to show views on the drawing surface, is that they have to reconceptualize the act of drawing itself. Instead of using the drawing as an episode in time, as a continuing dialectical relationship between their constantly changing understandings of the world and what is emerging on the drawing surface, they start to realize that the drawing surface may represent a single moment in space and time. One of the problems in evaluating the children’s art has been the definitional one of what constitutes a visual representation. If the observer cannot recognize an object within the drawing, then it is usually not considered a drawing at all but, at worst, a ‘scribble’, at best, a strange, deviant configuration, to be finally abandoned when the children learn ‘correct’ forms of representation. The question asked here is, if the children are not drawing the shapes of the object as perceived from either an actual or notional stationpoint, as some kind of ‘picture’ of the object, then what are they trying to draw? The answer seems to be that children are recording the event of their own processes of

90

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

perception and thinking about the object in relation to the medium. Very young children, in their use of visual media, are not drawing objects per se, but drawing their own process of attention. This is a very legitimate concern in contemporary art and has been so since Cezanne attempted to record the process of his own representational attention in front of nature. Like young children, he too was not credited for a long time for making an intelligible visual statement (Matthews, 1998, forthcoming).

Chapter 8 A Window on Consciousness

Ray Jackendoff (1994) calls language a ‘window on consciousness’. Drawing and other forms of visual representation are also ‘windows on consciousness’. Like language, they do not reflect the child’s thinking directly; there will always be differences between competence and performance. Additionally, the type, content and possibilities of thinking are constrained by the systems in which they are encoded. It is not possible to think about thinking without enlisting a semiotic system, nor is it possible to conceive of thinking independently of the forms of representation and symbolism in which it is encoded. However, by exactly the same token, because drawing and interactions with other visual media show this process of representation unfolding, they do show us something of the process of thinking. They do tell us something about how the child learns about the nature of representation. They tell us about how shapes on a page, or actions in the air, are enjoyed as structures in themselves yet also refer to events, objects and ideas beyond the drawing surface or playground; how a movement of the body can represent the movement of a wave, a cloud, an aeroplane. Reality Takes Shape: The World as a Construction Emerging on the Drawing Surface For the child, reality takes shape on the drawing surface and in the other forms of representational and expressive action he or she makes. In this chapter, we will continue to trace the development of children’s art, not by comparing it to some hypothesized ‘true’ vision of reality, somehow existing in some absolute sense and independent of any form of human representation, but as a construction of reality which emerges on the drawing surface itself. We have seen that different sorts of information are encoded into the drawing, some deriving from visual percepts of the object, some from knowledge of the structure of the object irrespective of viewpoint. Other representations produce hypothetical and sectional views. Some drawings are best described as drawing-centred—they have to do with the possibilities which emerge through the process of drawing. All of these have their origins in dynamic interaction between the child, the medium and the environment. Hence, when I write of representation here, I do not intend a simple re-presentation of a prior experience (although this can occur in media use). Nor is it usually the case that the young child derives visual descriptions from observation and recording of the physical world in a process akin to the European drawing and painting tradition. Rather, the organization and permutation of structural principles constructs an imaginary world on the drawing surface which is seen to analogue, in some respects, the world external to the drawing surface. This is also true, in a deeper and subtler sense, of all drawings—even those which supposedly come directly from observation of nature. The drawings and paintings produced in infancy are a development of those measured bursts of attention which were projected into the world in infancy and so structured the infant’s experience of the world. The construction of events and objects arises out of the events of painting and drawing. These actions allow the child to form a description of reality. There follows a description of one child’s hypothetical universe which issues from the interpenetrating worlds of drawing surface and representational play.

92

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Three Years Three Months to Five Years: Interaction across Media Domains In Ben’s drawings from 3 years 3 months, there is a sudden burst of drawings in which structural discoveries he has made are synthesized and consolidated. Given the right opportunities and support, this occurs for many other children too, and so, during the period between 3 and 4 years, there is often a proliferation of images formed from combinations and hybrids of structural principles. Elements are organized as structures of interest in themselves but children also perceive a relationship between basic drawing structures and forms, relations and events in the world. From about 2 years and 7 months, Ben has also been producing quite complex and interesting sculpture, on the terrain of the purple carpet in our living room. These constructions are striking not only for the mastery of balance and the dexterity of his physical skills of manipulation, but more fundamentally in terms of the perception and conceptualization involved. He uses a variety of three-dimensional media, including Lego, wooden Galt, or H.G.Wells blocks (see Gura, 1992, for research on block play). Together with these designed construction toys, he incorporates found objects, including, for example, coins, a ‘T’ Square, a ‘rose’ fitment for an electric light, and construction pieces from other kits. These objects are not selected randomly but are incorporated into his sculptural process according to the schemata which involve him at the moment. On the floor, lying amongst all these pieces of construction toys and other 3D media, he has his drawing book and pens. He often moves between ideas generated in two and three dimensions. In his representational play across media domains he is concerned with the structure of objects and with the structure of events; those to do with visible shape, and those which are concerned with the psychology of imagined actors in imagined worlds. I noted earlier an important process of development in which occur transformations from dynamic to configurative modes and vice versa (see p. 34). One interesting example of this process is in Ben’s use of sculptural materials, including Lego and wooden blocks in addition to a construction kit consisting of plastic straws and connecting units. For example, the phenomenon of ‘fire’ is firstly represented dynamically by jumbling together Lego, wooden blocks and plastic straws, and allowing these to tumble and fall through his hands whilst making appropriate, vocalized ‘fire’ noises. This is the dynamic beginning of his representation of the ‘fire’. Using the nearby, opened drawing book on the floor, he parallels this dynamic understanding in occasional drawings in which occur energetic explosions of elliptical marking, superimposed over drawings of buildings or vehicles. In his use of tumbling blocks, or the randomized superimpositions in his drawing, he represents the ephemeral event of fire. Over a period of about 10 days, his conceptualization of the fire evolves from this kind of dynamic thinking embedded in actions, to configurative terms, in which complexly articulated sculpture represent the visual form of tongues of flame (see Figure 57).

Figure 57

The cars and toy people form radiating lines around a central sculptural ‘fire,’ like the three-dimensional equivalent of a core and radial structure. There are many recorded instances in my studies, of the transference of deep structures, including core and radial, across media domains (Matthews, 1994b). Of course, there are some important implications for child-care and teaching provision here. We cannot expect children to develop their thinking if they are not given the time and opportunity to move from embedded, dynamic modes of thinking to conceptual and configurative modes

A WINDOW ON CONSCIOUSNESS

93

(Donaldson, 1978). It was because Linda and I did not clear away his work in progress, that he was able to move through a process of thinking rather like that of an artist, in which hazy, germinal beginnings are continually reworked and transformed over time (see also Bruce, 1987, 1991). Ben also makes railway track and roads from blocks and Lego pieces, imagining journeys through towering buildings or monstrous machines. These sculptures and installations are instrumental in informing Ben about key structures in drawing. Vertical straightline directions, horizontal linear directions, right-angular joins, congruence, parallelism, collinearity, closure, inside and outside, are all powerful structures which are echoed and re-echoed between two and three dimensions. Another construction toy which Ben has at this time is a series of plastic cups which can be either nested concentrically into one another, or else inverted and rested on top of one another, from larger to smaller, to form a tower. In his drawings at this time, these cups are canonically represented by U-shapes and U-shapes on baseline. This graphic form captures one of the cup’s main axes (see Figures 62 and 67 for examples). U-shape on baseline is a very powerful structure because it allows many denotational possibilities and structural permutations. It can be used singly, to draw volumes resting on flat planes, for example, sacks of toys on Santa’s sleigh (Figures 42 and 43, for examples) or hats with brims, which we discussed in Chapter 6 (Figure 40, p. 73). Or, a succession of U-shapes can be accreted together to form articulated legs and arms of various kinds, as in the drawing of a Giant in Figure 78; or towers, like the original tower of plastic cups (see Figure 67). It is only a small step to accrete Ushapes in multiple directions to form multi-cellular structures, including complex vehicles and buildings. Another influential toy for Ben is a wooden railway, complete with wooden engine and train, in which the tracks join together to form many configurations, curving and straight, oval and figure-of-eight. Here we find the important bridge, which appears as an inverted U-shape in his drawing of 3 years 2 months, in which he specifies higher and lower relations. We also find another three-dimensional structure which affects his drawing understandings. There is a wooden tunnel, in which the little train can pass out of sight and then reappear. Understandings of going-through, and how to represent this in drawing with hidden line elimination and occlusion are assisted by these performances. In a drawing made when Ben is 2 years 6 months, for example, he uses a red line to show the engine’s movement around the track. However, he stops this red circuit and adds to it a short section of blue paint which he says is the tunnel. Then he continues the red line again, joining it on to the end of the short, blue section, as if the train passes temporarily our of sight and then reappears from the tunnel. The wooden train set itself consists of short sections which are coupled together. The act of building the layout may assist his coupling and uncoupling of lines in paint. Possibly, whilst painting, Ben is also considering the train’s continuous existence, as it passes unseen on its journey through the tunnel. The deliberated colour change (rather than simply using the same red-loaded brush) would seem to support this interpretation. This example is of a conceptualization supported by a very concrete activity. It will be about 2 years later when Ben is able to show hidden line elimination and occlusion by use of line alone. In the present case, physical, concrete actions and the physical characteristics of paint, support the concept of the continued existence of an object as it makes an unseen passage of movement. He is trying to sort this out in drawing, too. At 3 years 3 months, Ben draws some interesting underground train journeys, in which he seems to be trying to reconcile different aspects or ‘views’ of the objects involved. There are side elevations of tunnels, and also their circular aspect. With these two opposing axes, he tries to coordinate different structural characteristics of the engine and train (Figures 58 and 59). In Chapter 6, we saw a similar translation from embedded thinking to conceptual thinking in Joel, at 2 years 11 months, when an initial representation of something ‘hiding’ was supported by the physical covering of layers of paint one over another (see p. 67). Only six days later the representation of covering was conceptually transformed with the act of concealment no longer reliant upon physical means, but sustained by the almost diagrammatic use of two linear closed shapes alone, the second drawn around the first, but representing covering the first (Matthews, 1984, 1990).

94

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 58

Figure 59

Going-through, going under, on top of; these are the salient dynamic structures here. These are explored in threedimensional space and in the two-dimensional world of the drawing. It is important to note that the process does not have to occur this way round; that is, I am not intending a process in which supposed ‘inferior’ dynamic thinking is gradually replaced by superior, abstract thinking. The process is two way, and movement in the opposite direction may represent an equally impressive development away from embedded thinking—we should not be mis-led by the mere nature of the media per se. For example, a dancer may first make a drawn notation on paper, which is afterwards developed to a dance. This is exactly what happens when Hannah, at 2 years 10 months, makes a drawing about a dance, and then moves into the four dimensions of space and time to perform the dance. Another example is when she makes a rotational drawing describing an aeroplane flight, and then immediately follows this up with the physical crashing of a hand-held toy into a tower of wooden blocks. The Deconstruction of Time As with all investigative and representational modes, this analysis of movement occurs in two basic ways: as continuous linear trajectory; or as successive displacements in space and time. These interests are impelled naturally from within the child. In Ben’s case, there is interpersonal support for these self-initiated concerns: certain plays between Ben, and either Linda or myself, may guide his understanding. As with other cultural exemplars, it is not the case that the child simply copies this from adult exemplars; rather, the play is retained within the culture solely because of the child’s demand for it. Like other plays, it becomes universal because it is incorporated into pre-existing action programmes generated by the child. ‘Round and round the garden’ is one such game, which I play with Ben from infancy and about which he makes a drawing (Figure 12, p. 36). I mentioned this play in Chapter 4 (see p. 35). It is a useful example because it shows the child’s combination of two ways of thinking about the movement of objects through time and space: as a continuous linear

A WINDOW ON CONSCIOUSNESS

95

movement; and as a series of discrete displacements in space and time. Plays in which hand-held figures are clompclomp-clomped along routes also inform the child about the successive displacement though space and time. These are translated onto the painting and drawing surface, in rhythmical plays in which the brush or pencil pursues a rhythmic beating path across the drawing or painting surface. As we have seen, these are sometimes underscored with vocalizations in a one-to-one correspondence between action and speech, a combination which has aesthetic and mathematical implications. The simple repetition along a vector of a stabbing brush, pencil, or a handheld figure, to represent discrete, separable stages of movement, serves as the basis for more sophisticated devices. In many of Ben’s drawings, from 3 years 2 months, movement is shown as a series of positions in space, in which a similar configuration, rather than a single point, is repeated across the page in episodic succession. In one drawing a helicopter crashes into the sea, and a man from another helicopter above is shown descending a rope in a series of stages, to rescue the drowning pilot (Matthews, 1996a). The use of the repeated image to show successive displacements in space and time is an understanding which has been assisted by the disassembling of the passage of movement in the play with three-dimensional objects. This deconstruction of time and the successive displacements of shapes through space prefigures the serialized images which come later. Another aspect of the interpersonal context for development is Linda’s and my own discussions with Ben about how pictures and picture stories work. Alan Costall has pointed out that images from the culture themselves form part of interpersonal context (Costall, 1992, personal communication). From age one year, Ben is shown picture story books, especially the ‘Rupert Bear’ series, written and drawn by the brilliant English artist Alfred Bestall. In these Rupert stories, the little bear travels through Nutwood or through mysterious doorways into secret passages which lead to magical lands; or else he flies to wondrous places in extraordinary flying machines. The images and the way the stories are constructed become, for a while, important influences on Ben’s use of three- and two-dimensional media. Bestall breaks down Rupert’s adventures through time and space into their episodic constituents. Linda and I discuss these stories with Ben, answering his questions about how these serialized images function. Initially, he is puzzled by the repetition of Rupert’s image—why is Rupert in the forest in one picture, yet in a house in the next picture? I explain that the first picture shows Rupert in the forest, and later on, after he has walked home, another picture shows him in his house with his mummy and daddy. It is important to note, however, that Ben’s serialized images are in no way like Bestall’s or any other picture story. As well as the important differences in the shapes Ben uses to make the images, another significant difference is the form taken by the serialization of time. Whereas Bestall divides individual pictures into separate frames, all the images in Ben’s drawings occur together, undivided, on the single page (it is not until around 10 years that he makes separated frames). Interestingly, these early serialized images are more like some Pre-Renaissance pictures, or Chinese ‘BlueGreen’ paintings (Jane Leong, 1997, personal communication) which show narrative and movement through time, and which Ben has not yet seen. This shows again, that people across different epochs and different cultures given the same representational problems, come up with the same solutions. The child does not incorporate just any available influence —does not simply ‘copy’ everything and anything—the exemplars to which the child is attracted are those which partially fit into existing or emerging schemata. These schemata, or attractors, detect useful exemplars and then act like conceptual and graphic templates through which the sources are filtered and adapted. I stress this because there are those who misleadingly consider development as a simple ‘copying’ process from an available ‘image pool’. Figure 60 is a drawing made by Ben, at 3 years 3 months, about his journey, with Linda pushing Joel in his pram, from nursery class to our house. It is a very interesting serialized event description, which describes the movement between two positions in time and space, and has narrative and geographical aspects. In addition to a starting and ending point, two other positions along the route are shown. The drawn line representing Ben’s, Joel’s and Linda’s journey from nursery school to home, corresponds in an almost geographical sense to the actual terrain it represents. This drawing is a transformation of the deep structure of beginnings and ends of lines. Instead of demarcating each end of the

96

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 60

Figure 61

Figure 62

line with a dot or blob, Ben positions the nursery school at the far right end of the line, and our house at the far left. In a representation which also has a strong narrative component, Ben and I are shown walking home from nursery school, Ben by my side, Joel in his pram. We cross, by a little bridge, the railway line, depicted so many times before in other drawings, and make our way up the extremely steep Vanbrugh Hill. The pram and figures are shown in two positions along the route. Eventually, we reach our front door, where Ben’s and Linda’s standing figures can just be discerned. Another aspect of this complex drawing is that depth effects may derive from attempts to show prolongation of movement. There is, for example, the diminution of Joel’s pram in position 2, after its ascent of the hill. This might of course be fortuitous, a production problem, an accidental consequence of leaving too little space to make the images the same size. Even if this is the case, it still visually functions, if not with a true sense of depth, then a feeling about distance. Jane Leong pointed out to me the subtle difference between ‘depth’ and ‘distance’ in relation to Chinese

A WINDOW ON CONSCIOUSNESS

97

‘Blue-Green’ paintings (Jane Leong, 1997, personal communication). Something of this distinction seems to occur in young children’s drawing. Ben’s series of drawings of a Flying Boat is a good example of the interaction between his internally driven agenda and what is available in the pictorial environment. These drawings are partially inspired by a ‘Rupert Bear’ adventure, but they are clearly very different from this source material, and in fact incorporate other understandings too, including the hand-held flight of toys in play, especially at bathtime. One very interesting example shows a temporal sequence within a single drawing, in which the boat moves through four positions, from middle, then to the left, and then to the right, in its ascent out of the water, leaving trails of water falling from beneath its hull (Figure 61). Evidence that Ben understands that he is registering the boat’s movement through time is his verbal explanation to me that ‘…it takes time’. An interesting feature of this drawing is in the image of the boat in position 4, at the far right. In this image, it is shown turned through 90 degrees. Why do the trails of water remain orientated at right angles to the hull? He certainly has not copied this, since no such exemplar exists. Gavin Bremner (1985) has described the complexities involved when children make this perpendicular attachment. The Piagetian explanation is that the child is not yet organizing all the elements of the drawing according to an overall coordinate frame of horizontals and verticals. However, a strong influence may be the power of the right-angular attachment principle to show differentiation between forms. Again, concepts embedded in language may be involved; the water falls from the ‘bottom of the boat’, or ‘underneath the boat’. It might be that the child considers each image or object as an autonomous, independent ‘object’, with its own individual, internal axes, which cannot be decomposed into an overall reference frame of x and y coordinates. In this case, boat plus water would be one complete ‘object’. Eventually, the drawing surface itself becomes conceived of as space, and space itself becomes an object which may be rotated in the imagination, and which incorporates all individual spaces of particular objects into an overall coordinate system. How does this come about? The observations suggest that, in much the same way as children recover invisible axes in objects, they imaginatively run axes through space, both in representational play, particularly with hand-held objects, and also on the drawing surface. We will see the sequence in development through which Ben moves to achieve this conceptualization of space. Given the right opportunities and support, children investigate many aspects of picturing. They try to capture the unbroken fluidity of events through time, and they also break it up into fragmented interludes. As a by-product of these investigations they sometimes come to realize the possibilities of the picture as representing a single ‘frozen array’ (Gibson, 1979). Such investigations of transformations, those caused by changes of position and those caused by changes of state, will help us understand some of Ben’s later pictures which cannot be easily divided into the object-centred and viewercentred categories, or intellectual and visual realism. If we look at Ben’s drawings from 3 years 1 month to 3 years 4 months, for example, he seems to be combining a variety of information about how things look, how things move, and the structure and identity of objects in themselves. Additionally, the images and structures in the drawings seem to be influenced by how phenomena might be conceptualized in language. In the Father Christmas drawings (see p. 77), there are specifications made of higher and lower relations, with the house shown sub-divided into lower and upper levels, divided laterally and in half across the closure defining it as an enclosing volume. Higher and lower relations are coherent, with sleighs gliding gracefully to the roof in several pictures. Going-through and parallelism form other key structures here; the passage between two vertical lines representing the chimney, sometimes with smoke, or Santa himself, going-through. Completely foreshortened or ‘edge-on’ views of planes also appear, like the table in Figure 42, p. 77. Remember, in the last chapter we saw Ben using a line to show a completely foreshortened flat surface—a slice of toast (Figure 37, p. 72). My own studies, described in Chapter 5, about foreshortened brims of hats show that, unlike Piaget’s dictum, very young children do sometimes represent foreshortened views of disks, if not always as true ‘views’ of the object, then as ‘proto-views’, the consequence of capturing the main axis of the flat object. Children tend to recover these basis axes as a means of establishing the identity of the object. In the case of the hat, a single dimensional line might be elicited as an

98

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 63

axis for the brim because this can be combined and contrasted against the two dimensional region representing the crown of the hat. We also saw that the situation is quite complex because, in other instances, the same aim of establishing the identity of an object, by capturing its characteristic axes, can disrupt representation of a true view. This sometimes happens when children recover the circular shape of the brim and combine this with the triangular shape for the crown. It might be that it is the identity of the object which is the main issue here. Young children can show a flat plane if it is a larger, unbound surface, like a road, or the floor of a house, as in Ben’s Father Christmas pictures. This is probably because drawing an infinitely large, flat plain does not entail disruption of the boundaries of a coherent object. Other directions are made across the picture plane, which unite horizontal, vertical and oblique directions, plus movements through these axes measured in terms of displacements in time as well as space. Consider, for example, a series of drawings produced by Ben from 3 years 2 months to 3 years 4 months. Very often, these drawings show a protosection through a house, with a sub-dividing line marking the upper level. Sometimes Father Christmas and reindeer are on the roof (e.g. Figure 42). Structural and Denotational Variation Having discovered the use of an oblique line to show a physical incline across the page, Ben combines this axis with another movement, that of travelling zigzags. In a series of drawings at 3 years 3 months, the zigzag is an important element, and Ben plays with the variations in denotational meaning which occur due to changes in context. For example, he uses it to represent a tail of a dog or a fox or, with slight variations, to represent a stairway. In these drawings, the link with entities in the external world is only provisional; a useful pivot around which many plays and interplays on structure and meaning, text and context, can be formed. In other drawings by Ben from 3 years 3 months to 3 years 4 months, he repeats a variety of images with permutations of structure. With slight, but crucial adaptations, a flying arc, or U-shape on baseline becomes a mountain, a table, a bed, the back of a horse, a bridge, or switch-backing road, over which, with great abandon, trains, cars or people soar. These are event structures, not just in the conventional sense of a picture story, not simply serialized images tied to a narrative rather, they are an interaction between entwined visual and linguistic commentaries, which enrich and transform each other as they unfold. Any verisimilitude with the external world is notional. The same is true of other graphic structures, for example, parallel grouped lines. This is another important structure at this time, and Ben produces many drawings in which these appear. Grouped parallels represent railway lines and fences. In circus pictures they appear as bars, or stripes of tigers; they acquire different denotational values in the headdresses of Red Indians; and different values again in the same drawing, as the long grass in which these people walk (Figure 64). In a drawing of an ‘Astronaut’s Footprint on the Moon’, they represent the tread pattern of the sole of the boot (Figure 63). Implied contours are also present in these images (see Matthews, 1994a). Physically similar parallel verticals have an entirely different denotational values as trails of water pouring from theunderside of ‘Flying Boat Taking off Out of Water’ (Figure 61, p. 99). He uses parallel lines again in a drawing of a ‘Dead Soldier’, in which an analytical dismantling of his drawing strategies is simultaneously the representation of the death and dismemberment of the human body (Figure 65). It is as

A WINDOW ON CONSCIOUSNESS

99

Figure 64

Figure 65

Figure 66

if these structures, once generated on the drawing surface, are dynamic templates which not only capture related structures in the external world, but sometimes act as metaphors for physical processes. ‘Darkness’ is a palpable, dynamic entity in some drawings at around this time, for example, in ‘A House: Darkness Outside. Darkness is at the windows of the House’ (Figure 66). In these drawings, the way in which the darkness is depicted in relation to the house pose questions about the transformational values of these shapes and marks. Although the outline of the house is depicted, and we can see the surrounding space, are we simultaneously inside the house looking out at the darkness, which is, so to speak, pressed against the windows? Ben says the darkness is ‘outside’ but in topological terms he has drawn it inside the closed-shape. This makes one uneasy about analysing the drawings in terms of object-centred descriptions which capture the main axes of the object. On the other hand, neither does the idea of a multiplicity of views seem quite right. Again, the notions of object-centred versus viewer-centred, whilst helpful, do not completely explain such drawings. Some of the working out of denotational values in drawing is echoed in the continuous transformations which occur in representational play with his toy figures in miniature landscapes of Lego, blocks and other objects. As he manipulates these toy figures through their adventures, Ben runs a continuous spoken commentary about their actions and their thoughts and feelings. In this play, ideas and associations about changes of state and changes of position are integrated together with a continuous spoken commentary. Objects are transformed repeatedly and released from their normal functions and meanings, as he represents transformations which are related to both real and magical causal

100

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 67

relations. In the spoken dialogue between participants, in which Ben acts each character, changing his voice for each speaker, we hear ideas about danger, destruction and death; we gain some insight into the thoughts, feelings and motivations of these different, imagined personalities as they help or oppose each other. There are ideas about continuous trajectories and rhythmical, successive, seriated movements. There are ideas based on the inside and outside relation, when, for example, figures are trapped in a bucket which magically transforms to a prison. These seem effortlessly integrated together in a free-flowing sequence of poetic narration and onomatopoeic sound effects, in which body actions are organized from larger scale movements involving his whole body down through levels of successively finer actions culminating in finely tuned coordination of manipulation of toy figures and eye focus. The child’s representations show a concern with the identity, shape, location and movement of objects, but they also show a concern for the identity, shape, location and movements of those very special objects, people. As we began (see p. 13), it may be that children enter the world equipped with two sorts of schemes: those for understanding objects; and those for understanding people. We are seeing both types of understandings reflected in children’s representation. Certainly, representations are often concerned with understanding the structure of objects and events, but many forms of representation are concerned with the understanding of human, interpersonal relations. Over and over again, we will see that much of the content and structure of children’s representation is part of a project to understand not only what makes objects move and work—what makes objects ‘go’ —but what makes people ‘go’. Many of the machines, in both block structures and drawings, involve aggregates of accreted cells. In the block structures, this is accomplished by following linear configurations and axes as they suggest themselves. This process was initiated in infancy using First Generation Structure, when the relationship between two blocks was perceived as one of touch or connectivity. Thus, first of all, two blocks are banged together using vertical arcing actions. This is the beginning of a continuum in which, gradually, they are placed congruent with each other, forming the beginning of an axis. So, to a certain extent, Ben’s block structures are precipitated by congruence along certain vectors. However, this is not to say that these structures only follow fortuitous starting points. Ben’s drawing and play with a variety of media allows him to interiorize spatial axes. These understandings of the assemblage and congruence between separate units influence his drawings. U-shapes, once attached to a single baseline, are now accreted one to another, forming towers, and other complex structures (Figure 67). An unusual use of towers of U-shapes is when he uses them to form the Giant’s legs in Figure 78, p. 116. By controlled decrease in the size of each additional U-shape, Ben suggests a view of the Giant from a low station-point. Here again, this effect is not a fortuitous result of an unconscious successive diminution of shapes, but an intended effect, requiring forward planning and visualization. As with his block play, in his drawing he can run structures through controlled axes: horizontal, vertical and a range of oblique directions. He can enclose units of similar structure one on top of another, or one inside the other—structure upon structure; structure within structure— iteratively. Controlled variations of iterative structures are accomplished partially by his continual and fluid relationship with the structural possibilities emerging through manipulation of the elements, in conjunction with the continually transforming

A WINDOW ON CONSCIOUSNESS

101

nature of symbolic play. These flawless, yet unscripted plays sometimes involve adventures of heroes against dangerous or malevolent forces. They involve the construction and destruction of machines, of complex architecture, processes themselves influenced by the demands of narration. Although there are big differences between language and visual art, to a certain extent Ben’s drawings, paintings and sculptures are texts which are often organized along conversational lines (Chafe, 1994). Stetsenko (1995) has also written about the interrelationship between language and drawing in childhood. Chance plays a part in these event narratives. When a block is dislodged, or a building tumbles, Ben immediately changes the script in mid-flow, perhaps pretending that an earthquake or explosion has occurred, and now the actors will have unforeseen problems to cope with; dangerous climbs to make or tunnels to dig; or perhaps rescue is at hand. We have seen before, in our first chapter, the winds of chance which fan the ‘fire’ of the play of Aaron and his friends. Full-blown representational play is in a state of continuous transformation; a flowing collaboration between the technical requirements of construction and the imagined intentions of imagined actors (Wolf, Rygh and Altshuler, 1984; Bruce, 1987, 1991). In turn, the thoughts and feelings of actors in these hypothetical worlds are internalized derivatives of the duologues children experience as infants with their parents. Ben’s emotions, and his emotional relationship with others, are analogued within a micro-world which he himself controls. Some actions and events occur in play which cannot happen in the physical world, but can only unfold in the hypothetical realities of play. This play world is not concerned with verisimilitude with external reality, but is a structure in itself. This is not to say that it is completely dislocated from external reality. Play has a rich network of communication channels to the external, physical and interpersonal world. Moreover, it derives its currency from the external world; it has causal and physical relations with the external world. Its motive force derives from within the child, but it is fuelled by its links with the external world. It is Winnicott’s (1971) transitional, potential space; an intermediate zone, in which elements from the external world can be stripped of their usual meaning and become the currency of symbolization and art. In just the same way as I have argued about the influence of ready-made still images—and contrary to popular opinion —television is not a major influence on children’s representational play. In Ben’s case he had no television, but all children’s interaction with television is both guided and constrained by their attractor systems. Children are able to use the themes which appear in moving pictures only to the extent that they themselves are spontaneously generating them. The success of certain programmes with children is due to the way these programmes use themes and actions which form structures the children are themselves forming. Although children may play at Superheroes, this is because plots of these programmes are based on the deep structures of representation and expression, for example, the dynamic trajectories and spatial relations in the Teletubbies (Athey, 1997, personal communication). Another good example is Hannah’s use of the compass-array structures she sees in a television game show. The point is that Hannah spontaneously generates this structure in drawing, which then alerts her to its presence in the environment, television programmes forming a part of that environment. I will discuss this example in more detail shortly (see p. 108). The control and use of power is another central theme of children’s representation. Again, whilst this theme is present in films, television programmes and stories for children, its recurrence in children’s representation is not explained in terms of a simple copying of these exemplars. Rather, it is the other way around; it is children’s spontaneous generation of these ideas which maintains the presence of the exemplars in the culture. In Ben’s play and representation, the control, uses and abuses of power are often represented by ‘fire’; a deeply attractive theme which we see in his play, sculpture and drawings during this period. In these images of blazing vehicles, cars, spacecraft, (echoed and re-echoed in his play), it is hard to say whether Ben is the driver of the vehicle or the vehicle itself. Driver and power source are undifferentiated; Ben is, at one and the same time, the source of locomotive power and its initiator and controller. In a drawing about a ‘Car Burning on the Side of a Hill’ we can see a multiplicity of meanings, both in formal terms and in how the text of the drawing interlocks with experiences and entities of different classes, mental and physical. Ben

102

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 68

is in the picture, Ben is in the car, the letter ‘B’ is Ben, Ben is the car, the car is Ben, the car is in flames, the road turns to flame. These layers of associations are present in many drawings of this time, showing that we should be cautious in accrediting only the older child and adolescent with the ability to use multiple levels of symbolism. For example, in ‘Six Boys with Flags’ (Figure 48), which I described in Chapter 6 (see p. 82), there is the same flow of manipulation of meaning between arbitrary signs and pictorial symbol which is almost like visual ‘punning’. As I mentioned, some writers (for example, Nye, Thomas and Robinson, 1995) argue that very young children do not initially understand fully the role of the picture as a representation. Freeman (1995) also argues that it will take some time before the child fully appreciates the picture’s relationship to artist and beholders. But I suspect that the development of such understandings may vary considerably with the kind and quality of discourse to which the child is exposed. The beginnings of these understandings seem to be present in Ben at 3 years 3 months. The difference between this play on meanings in young children’s work and that of adolescents is perhaps an increase, in the later works, in the degree of conscious articulation of signs. ‘Fire Coming from a Spacecraft’ is a variation of the theme of ‘fire’ of this period (Figure 46). The dynamic structure going-through is used in several drawings, with the passage formed between the two parallel lines, and ‘B’ for Ben is again present, alongside a travelling zigzag. This zigzag is differentiated semiotically from the physically similar dynamic sinusoidal lines nearby, because the former is emergent handwriting describing the events occurring in the drawing, and the latter is fire going-through the spacecraft. Ben’s drawings made between 3 years 9 months and 4 years show the gradual coming together of many ideas about movement, shape and location and the beginnings of the use of optical size variation to show depth. Although I have mainly focused on drawings during this period, Ben also uses paint. At 3 years 9 months he paints ‘Man Shooting Wolf with Bow and Arrow’ (Figure 68). Note how the medium of paint affects the form of the painting. Instead of using a linear configuration, here he defines the wolf, and the tubular nature of the bow and arrow with regions of solid, three-dimensional looking volumes. Claire Golomb (1974, 1992, 1993) has pointed out that different media may cause significant differences in children’s production, since each particular medium elicits or enhances certain qualities and characteristics rather than others. In some cases, the medium allows different structural and representational opportunities. In others cases, the same or similar strategies are applied, but their interaction with different media causes very important structural and expressive variation. We saw a similar balance between application of theme and variation when very young children switched from traditional colouring and drawing materials to electronic paint. The ‘Excavator’ drawing of 3 years 9 months (Figure 69), is a synthesis of all the drawing structures he has at his disposal. He uses closure, controlled contour variation, accretion of closed U-shapes on baseline, or U-shape on Ushape and U-shapes which can be bent or stretched. He also uses angular variation of attached lines and corners, multiple polygonal shapes, sinusoidal lines, core and radial, compass array structures, right-angular grids, travelling zigzag, spirals, partitioning of shapes, division and subdivision. The spokes of the wheels are revealing, for we can see him moving from right-angular grid structure to a new form of core and radial in which the rays are arranged around

A WINDOW ON CONSCIOUSNESS

103

Figure 69

different points of the compass. In the former type, the rays are aligned to an overall vertical and horizontal coordinate scheme; in the latter, each attachment forms its own local perpendicular junction. (I mentioned the development of this structure in Chapter 5, p. 56.) This latter type of core and radial I call the compass-array (Matthews, 1994b). We can see the beginning of this in the core and radial to the right in Figure 8 (p. 28), and a developed example in Figure 72 (p. 107). Angular Variation, Moment-of-turn and Compass Array Piaget and Inhelder (1956) argue that children are predisposed to structure linear attachment at right angles, regardless of the overall picture, and only gradually do they progress to being able to organize linear junctions according to a coordinate frame which encompasses the entire picture. Nowadays, many researchers feel that the situation is more complex than this. There are situations in which the reverse of Piaget’s theory occurs. There are a variety of factors which influence the angle at which children attach lines to baselines (Bremner, 1985). It seems that, in some instances, and in contrast to Piaget’s and Inhelder’s idea, some children will initially organize attachment of lines according to an overall X and Y coordinate system, overriding individual instances of attachment at varying points of the compass. This is noticeable especially if the drawing is a nonrepresentational one, concerned with shapes and lines as entities in themselves. Thus, if they draw core and radial shapes, these rays might follow basic horizontal and vertical vectors, or if they draw entities, like the spokes of a wheel, they criss-cross lines over each other along horizontal and vertical coordinates. The observations suggest that they may carry this type of planning over into drawings of objects, for example, the tables with people around, which I described on pp. 86–9. Gradually, children learn to vary the angle at which each attachment is made, varying the moment-of-turn, so that a controlled increase or decrease in obliquity from a baseline may be achieved. Or else, if attaching lines to a curving baseline—for example, rays around a closed shape—they can attach each ray at approximate right angles. We can see a gradual mastery of moment-of-turn, in Hannah’s drawings from 5 years 1 month 18 days to 5 years 2 months 3 days (Figures 70, 71, 72 and 73). Having realized that she can vary at will the obliquity with which she can attach lines to baselines, she is alerted to the presence of oblique attachment in the visual environment. She assimilates to this attractor all manner of angular variation; stars, clowns’ pointed hats, tassles and bells, the whiskers of a cat, the hands of a clock. She notices that in some graphic structures, producing and reading the angle of attachment between lines is crucial for the recovery of their meaning. Letter and number shapes come into this category. Hannah now enthusiastically writes or draws ‘Ks’, ‘Rs’ and other letters and numbers within which this angle of attachment is vital for their meaning. This is a part of emergent writing, which I mentioned above. Another example of the oblique junction as an attractor for letter forms was also mentioned above. This occurs in Figure 45, when a 4-year-old Chinese Singaporean child draws, or writes, ‘xia’—Mandarin for ‘down’.

104

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 70

Figure 71

Another important representational use of the oblique line and the oblique attachment of line is when it is used to show the third dimension. This occurs when it is used to represent edges which in the physical world remain horizontal, but which in pictures are represented as oblique orthogonals to show their recession from a notional viewer. It may be that some children start to add this new specification to their object-centred descriptions, for example in Ben’s ‘Steam Engine’, in Figure 75, which I will describe shortly, or the child’s house in Figure 74. Hannah produces an interesting sequence when she tries to copy a two-dimensional drawing of a cube (Figure 71). This tells us something about the way young children start to understand the use of oblique lines to show orthogonals. In some drawings, she knows that the lines slope, but she is not sure which way they should slope. She is trying to capture this new, view-specific information, yet at the same time preserve the main characteristics of the object. Note that the difficulty children might have in drawing oblique projection is not simply a motor skills problem. It is not merely because they cannot make the requisite motor actions and produce the drawn angles involved. In an interesting experiment by Phillips, Hobbs and Pratt (1978), children were asked first to copy a two-dimensional model of a cube,

A WINDOW ON CONSCIOUSNESS

105

Figure 72

Figure 73

then copy an abstract pattern which contained exactly the same kinds of line junctions and shapes. The youngest children had difficulties copying the two-dimensional cube but were better able to copy the abstract pattern, even though it had within it the same shapes as in the drawing of the two-dimensional cube. This would suggest that the problem is an intellectual one, rather than a motor one; that the problem does not derive from a difficulty in producing the requisite shapes and line junctions involved, but from jumping to a new transformational rule about the meanings of the lines and line junctions. This revolution may still be occurring even in some adolescents’ drawings—the amount and quality of teaching may be critical, as well as the opportunities for free, structural investigation. We will return to this issue shortly, when we consider Ben’s steam engine series. After Hannah has struggled to copy the cube, she relaxes from this challenging task and free-plays with structural variation, fluidly manipulating the line and the array of possible shapes and line junctions she can produce (Figure 71). This helps her develop all manner of compass-arrays, zigzags, numbers, letters, and starburst designs which require sophisticated forward planning (Figure 72). This, in turn, helps her produce another interesting sequence of drawings, based on a device she sees on a television show. This device is a huge dial, with a single spinning pointer attached to its centre. This dial has a huge circular face, divided into quadrants, in which a telephone number of a TV viewer is printed. The master of ceremonies spins the large pointer around this dial and waits for it to come to rest on one or other quadrant, whereupon, the owner of the telephone number, as printed within the quadrant, is called up and asked to appear on next week’s show. Hannah makes some fascinating drawings of this (Figure 70).

106

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 74

Figure 75

In her final drawing of this series (Figure 73), lines follow a variety of directions and bisect small nuclei. The production of each line is accompanied by onomatopoeic vocalizations. The drawing represents X-rays bombarding a tumour in her brother’s brain. I will return to these examples in the final chapter, for it has a bearing on our understanding of the deeper metaphorical levels of meaning in even young children’s drawings. These works derive from the hypothetical universes constructed in pretend play, with three-dimensional objects and toys, and also the play of structural variation on the drawing surface. Drawing becomes enriched through this nurtured interplay between the two domains. It is a process in which drawing structures are generated and seen to correspond with relationships, not only those which occur in the ‘real’ world, but also those which do not and cannot. These latter relationships are those which can only exist on the drawing surface; which emerge through the interplay of configurations and the child’s imaginative reconstruction of the world of concrete experience. This is the true source of drawing skills and other ‘creative’ skills. Different Types of Information At 4 years and 3 months, Ben is trying to capture more of the truth about objects. He is very interested in steam engines and, in addition to a few toy trains, he has also collected by this time many postcards and photographs of trains. Figure 75 is an interesting drawing of a steam train in which we can see the front of the engine, two sides of the carriage, plus the structure of the railway lines, as if in plan view. This drawing is of a kind often referred to as a ‘fold-

A WINDOW ON CONSCIOUSNESS

107

out’ drawing. This term is misleading, because, as Arnheim writes (Arnheim, 1954), for the child, nothing was foldedin in the first place. This is a perceptive comment, because it shows up the typical adultomorphism of interpretations of children’s art. It also highlights a naivete about drawing, i.e., that some projections of objects have a natural verisimilitude with the appearance of reality (presumed to exist in some absolute sense, independent of any representation) and that this verisimilitude is lacking in some ‘stages’ of children’s drawing. We may ask the same question about this drawing as we asked of other so-called object-centred drawings we discussed above: Are we looking at several combined ‘views’ of the object? It might be the case that Ben draws one view of the object, moves across the paper, and attaches another view to a convenient baseline, and so on. Alternatively, he may be trying to record the main structure irrespective of any particular viewpoint. In the light of his other drawings, I think we can assume that this is not a result of a production ‘problem’. Nor do I feel that a desire for symmetry is a particularly powerful influence on Ben’s drawing. The path his spatial construction follows may be still very malleable, depending to a certain extent on the order of production and the possibilities he sees arising. Drawings like this may function like conversations around a topic, the topic here being ‘Steam Engine’. Ben has discussed, to himself, the various aspects of the train: including the facts that it has a front, that it has two sides, that there is a track it runs upon. However, another sort of information vies with this object-centred knowledge. In studying his photographs and postcards of steam engine trains, he is impressed by the dramatic linear perspective of these machines zooming in and out of optical infinity. He has noticed in these pictures that the top and bottom edges of these trains and engines—in reality, horizontal—can be rendered with oblique lines to show that they are receding back into the third dimension. In his drawing, he has rendered the top and bottom edges of the two sides of the carriage as oblique edges. Essentially, he has added two oblique projections, one on each side of the face of the engine. One significant point is that, although he has been influenced by the many images he has acquired of steam engines, in none of these are two sides of the carriage seen simultaneously. In linear perspective, this is an impossible view. Ben has been reluctant to abandon the side of the carriage which would be made invisible according to the rules of perspective. Although he is starting to be interested in views to the extent that he can overcome the intellectual difficulty of using oblique lines to stand for horizontal edges, he is not yet ready to relinquish the fact of the two sides of the carriages. Another interesting feature is that though, in the photographs and postcards, the orthogonals of the train recede and converge at infinity, he has avoided using this device, but maintained a parallel relationship between the oblique lines rather than making them converge. One may wonder why. If he were to make the orthogonals converge, perhaps this would disrupt or violate his sense of the true form of the object—how can the roof and floor of the carriage ever touch? It may be a case of making one step at a time, so in this drawing he makes each of the sides an oblique projection, rather than adopting a one point linear-perspective projection. This would conform to John Willats’ idea about sequence in which projective systems are acquired. The acceptance of orthogonals converging at a vanishing point remains for a later date. Another way of describing this is that the child is detecting and recovering from the visual array another powerful, non-accidental or invariant structure. This is parallelism. Observations suggest that, before children have discovered, or have been taught, perspectival skills involving convergence of orthogonals, they will recover from perspective pictures, not the actual shapes and linear directions on the picture surface itself, but the invariant properties and relations of the things depicted. In this case, what Ben detects and recovers, both from the visual array in three-dimensional space, and from perspective pictures, is the structure of being-in-line. Alan Costall (1995) suggests that people recover from pictures the invariant properties of objects and relationships, and that perspective pictures are just one among many different ways this information might be encoded.

108

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Conclusion This kind of drawing is part of a transitional phase. Children discern indeterminacies or ambiguities in such drawings and try to resolve them. Does this mean that, due to interaction between perception and production, it is inevitable that children move towards making views of objects? It might be that the system for drawing the object becomes an ‘object’ in the sense that we use the term for describing ‘objects’ in a computer’s brain, that is; initially the object cannot be decomposed and dismantled into separate elements. This would mean that, for a short while, drawings are made up of immutable autonomous units, which are all-of-a-piece, and unrelated in terms of depth relations to other units, until the child can decompose these and see each part as being extended within an overall, all encompassing three-dimensional space. Although Ben’s drawing is a little atypical, nevertheless, many other children do try, as they grow older, to resolve the problems of preserving the coherence and identity of individual objects whilst describing these as coordinated within a total three-dimensional space. For this reason, I will use my study of his work as a starting point for the discussion of processes of development which, in some respects at least, are generalizable to other people.

Chapter 9 Point of View: Visual Representation in Later Childhood

In this chapter I will continue to describe, in developmental terms, how children move from constructing objectcentred descriptions to those which show view-specific information. The move from one approach to another is not explained by recourse to a theory which proposes that one or other approach is available as an option from the early infancy. According to this idea, what develops are not the ‘resources’, but merely the ‘resourcefulness’ of the child in being able to select from one or other mode (Costall, 1995). We have seen that the use of one or other mode is an ecological issue; and that modes develop in accordance with ecological requirements. As Alan Costall has argued, the construction of depth on the picture plane requires a developmental explanation, and this is what I will offer now. Movements in Space and Time: Depth and Distance We have now seen the child forming and deploying powerful modes of visual representation concerned with the shape, location and movements of objects and their identity; what things look like, where things are, where things go and what things are. Children show interest in both the configuration of shape of objects, and also their characteristic trajectories or flight-paths in space and time. Closely tied up with identifying the unity and coherence of objects is the plotting and monitoring of their movements. It might be that visual descriptions of objects are the derivatives of event descriptions. The active construction of paths of movement in drawings and paintings results in the specification of the structure of events and objects within the process of drawing. These effects may be one of the consequences of the child’s efforts to capture the directions of movement involved within and between objects and events. Alternatively, it may be that, almost as a by-product of trying to encode more about the structure of objects and events, the child starts to project depth relations onto the drawing surface. It need not be the case initially, that the child sets out with the intention of conveying depth relations. Ben, like many other children, initially shows movement going up the page, down the page and along the page. Very soon, like other children, he discovers that movement may be prolonged by various ways of going around the page. Like other children, he manages to make other kinds of direction change in their linear journeys. Children master stopping and starting the line at will and making changes in the direction of line. This intense and skilful direction change allows vast imaginary distances, and sometimes depth, to be compressed into the available drawing space. Simultaneously, as narrative and action modes of representation emerge, this also allows represented adventures to be prolonged. As the adventure of line becomes more sophisticated, so every zig and every zag, every crinkle and fold can be used to suggest travel over vast distances. Vocalizations, commentaries or stories often accompany line production. For example, at 3 years 2 months, Ben describes a train journey from our house in London, to Granddad’s house in Liverpool as a sinusoidal line which doubles back on itself folding space and time together into compressed layers. In some children’s drawings the mapping of vertical axes on the drawing surface sometimes leads to another device, that of placing the objects imagined to be further away from a notional viewer, higher up the picture surface. Further up the drawing surface comes to mean further away, and is a device common in the art of many periods and places. Of

110

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

course, the vertical axis is simultaneously used to show higher and lower relations too, and it might be that the resultant ambiguity encourages the child to construct a new, oblique axis along the picture surface. We saw something of this ambiguity occurring in the children’s drawings of tables (pp. 86–9), and John Willats has described this in relation to vertical oblique projections we find in children’s drawings and also in the paintings of artists during several periods of history, for example, Persian and Indian paintings (Willats, 1997). Even in some early drawings the child attempts to show depth or distance from a notional viewer, as if through the drawing surface itself. We have seen that sometimes this occurs in the literal, physical sense, of poking the pencil, pen or paintbrush through the paper. In other instances, the smallness of a dot or shape compared with a larger shape may possibly be intended to show optical or apparent size difference caused by nearer-further relations to a notional viewer. ‘People Standing in a Crowd in the Rain’ (Figure 2), might be an example of this, in which human figures are represented as dots because they are imagined as being far away. Notice, incidentally, that this powerful representation is made up of two First Generation Structures: horizontal arc and vertical arc. As we have seen, children also show, in their spontaneous drawings and paintings, an interest in in-front-of-andbehind relations—really the beginnings of occlusion and overlap. One example is part of the process of differentiation I described above, when children ‘clothe’ their tadpole figures with superimposed crayoning and arrive at a visual description of the body unit of the human figure. In this sense, objects are constructed out of event scripts; the result of an interplay of forces. Ironically, much experimental work, designed specifically to investigate these abilities, gets caught in a circular situation and uses paradigms and methodologies which conceal the abilities under investigation. Sometimes, as we have seen, the continuity of line is broken down into its constituent parts. Eventually, this earlier dismantling of continuous line into reiterated points in space-time is transformed into a new visual description of movement. Ben starts to compose serialized images which succeed each other across the page to show the passage of a single object through space and time. In many of these drawings there is an embryonic use of apparent or optical size change to show depth—or perhaps, more accurately, distance. Possibly, the children are not setting out to capture depth per se, but rather the depth effect is the result of their representation of the movement of objects away from their own selves, what we might term their ‘going-awayness’. Of course, not all size variation of image should be taken to mean a representation of a notional optical size difference or a concern with nearness or farness. In some drawings, the projection of depth relations onto the two-dimensional surface is simply not an issue. In some drawings it may be the result of production problems, of leaving too little space and so being obliged to reduce the size of the image. Other changes in size of images may refer to ‘distance’ or ‘closeness’ of the object in another, psychological sense. Something of the kind might be behind the oft-claimed relationship between size of image and emotional significance of the subject (Thomas and Silk, 1990). Gradually, Ben produces drawings in which the repeated image of a travelling object is reduced in size with the clear intention of showing an object moving away from his own self. This starts at 3 years 6 months. Going Back Through the Picture Plane At the young age of 3 years 6 months, Ben is using a controlled decrease in apparent size to show a stage coach moving, not only across the picture plane but also back though the picture plane (Matthews, 1994a). In earlier drawings, the depth effect may have been fortuitous, the result of an unintentional change of size of the repeated image. It may have been his perception of the depth impression obtained by such size changes which leads him to construct these purposely. There is also a level at which the mathematical series of graded size diminution is enjoyed as a structure in itself. It seems that these different avenues of development converge. Ben’s drawing of the recession of the stage coach is the first such picture where there is a clearly articulated intent to construct depth relations using carefully calibrated size change of the shapes on the paper surface. The impulse to investigate the representation of recession or procession may

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

111

Figure 76

derive, not from trying to represent depth per se, but from concern with the direction of movement relative to the self. In this, and other examples, Ben is trying to capture the ‘going-awayness’ or the ‘coming-towardness’ of an object. Another example of the use of optical size difference to show recession through the picture plane is 5-year-old Chinese Singaporean Li Yu’s drawing of a ship receding into the distance (see Figure 76). For about nine months, Ben elaborates this device, trying to integrate this new kind of visual information with other information about the object in itself. Drawings which have mixtures of view-specific and object-centred information (like Figure 75, which I described on p. 109), are probably very important to children’s development. This is because within them they try to sort out how different kinds of information—that concerned with the shape of objects as seen from a certain position in space, and that concerned with the structure of the object irrespective of any particular viewpoint—might be reconciled with each other. It may be that, in trying to make further stipulations about the structure of the object, children start to perceive that they have produced drawings which do not show a possible view of the object. This may lead them to a realization that, depending on viewpoint, it is not always necessary to draw some aspects of the object, when those parts of the object are hidden by nearer parts which interrupt their line-of-sight to them. The issue, then, for the child, might be to reconcile two different sorts of information; that concerned with the shape of objects as seen from a certain position in space, and that concerned with the structure of the object irrespective of any particular viewpoint. Children may detect the indeterminacies inherent in such drawings and set about to resolve them. Arnheim’s comments are again pertinent here, that the child progresses in drawing not so much by trying to improve some kind of perceptual match between the drawing and the observable world, but by trying to sort out the ambiguities arising on the drawing surface itself. More recently, John Willats’s research also supports this essential idea that the children’s drawing develops, not by closer observation of nature per se, but by children gradually learning the constraints and possibilities of the drawing medium. Through the feedback loop of action and perception, they detect and try to resolve denotational and transformational inconsistencies in their drawings (Willats, 1981, 1985, 1992a). In a stunning series of drawings made at 4 years 3 months, we can see Ben moving through such a process, as he tries to convey depth relationships by various devices. First of all, he seems to separate out these different elements, studying them independently. In perspectival pictures, many different elements come together to form a complete depiction of depth, but these elements also work independently of each other and appear in many pictures in art history. Devices including occlusion, hidden line elimination, optical size variation, even aerial perspective, are not necessarily tied to linear perspective. Other projective systems utilize these; for example, oblique projection as used in Japanese paintings, and in the JinYuen (literally, ‘Near-Far’) system of Chinese painting. Gradually, we will see Ben bring together, and coordinate in single depictions, several different ways of showing projective relations; occlusion, hidden line elimination and texture gradients, as well as parallel oblique orthogonals, and later on, converging orthogonals.

112

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 77

Taking a Perspective The development of skills of viewing or selecting and maintaining a view occurs through the interaction between the spontaneous urge to master objects and the more playful interaction with them. Some of this occurs in the trajectory play we observed in the last chapter. Adults do not usually introduce children to these skills—at least, not overtly. Skills of visual praxis are developed and designed through the practice and maintenance of a representational and expressive play; skills in handling and looking are learnt and mastered not as an incidental consequence of play but in order to construct representational play. John Willats (1977, 1984, 1985) suggests that the development of drawings systems stops short at perspective. He thinks that though children seem to move spontaneously through topological, multiple aspect, vertical and horizontal oblique projections, and eventually naive perspective, linear perspective has to be taught. However, this idea needs careful deconstruction. In Ben’s and other cases, we can see that at least the main ingredients of linear perspective are obtained through development. Apparent or Optical Size Difference and In-lineness In some drawings of steam engines he produces at 4 years 3 months, Ben is combining apparent size diminution with inlineness to show depth recession. Ben does not make these discoveries in social isolation. He captures both invariants, in-lineness and optical size difference, from real life, when he travels on a steam engine at 2 years 10 months. There is also important interpersonal interaction with his parents, including discussions about pictures, books and model steam engines, and about the way depth effects are obtained. An interesting picture of 4 years 3 months shows a train zooming out of optical infinity up to a notional viewer (Figure 77). In this drawing, he has left out the carriage altogether, perhaps putting to one side, as it were, this further complication. It is easier to cope with the graded diminution of a single face, rather than that of the representation of a three-dimensional solid. Size variation in the image of this steam engine means that Ben is constructing depth back through the picture plane. Here, drawing one shape smaller than another is a means of specifying that this is further away from the larger shape; that it is optically smaller—not physically smaller. His drawing process suggests that this accomplishment is not really reliant on his perception of initially accidental or fortuitous changes of scale. If we start from the smallest point on the horizon line in this drawing, the one which represents the engine at its furthermost position, we find there is a carefully graded size magnification from smallest to biggest, in which Ben shows the front face of the steam engine coming closer. So carefully graded, from smallest to largest, is this series of shapes that, if one imagines a straight edge running along the chimneys of each image to the point on the horizon, there is an implied oblique formed which converges at optical infinity with the baseline. Hence, Ben has implicitly created a single-point

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

113

Figure 78

Figure 79

perspective drawing. By coordinating these two invariants—graded diminution of apparent or optical size and in-lineness—Ben produces a virtual one-point linear perspective drawing. If we place a ruler against the tops of each engine, we create a line which, in conjunction with the baseline, makes a pair of lines which converge at optical infinity. These and other effects, are the by-products of thinking about movement to and from a notional watcher at the scene. His carefully calibrated decrease in the size of the visual object as it recedes toward the horizon implies the invisible orthogonal of a linear perspective system. It is as if one system mathematically nests within another, and that by investigating and executing one system in a logical way, other interior systems, implicit within it, will emerge. Ben seems to have virtually reached this point by his own interaction with the drawing process, plus—and this is important —conversations with his parents about how the geometry of the drawing works. He has not, however, received overt instruction about perspective. Other examples include Figures 78 & 79, which show extreme low angle views of a Giant. In these pictures too, the converging lines of the giant’s legs, as we look up them, prefigure the convergence of orthogonals in linear perspective. Both drawings combine convergence with optical or apparent size change. For the next month or so, he is still working on the principle that big / small on the drawing surface equals near / far in the real world. For example, in ‘Soldiers’ (Figure 80) produced by Ben at 4 years 4 months, the nearer boot of a soldier is drawn optically larger than his further one. This effect occurs again in a drawing of a Native North American, —‘A Red Indian Walking Towards You’, produced at 5 years 1 month (Figure 93) (Matthews, 1994a). As with other discoveries, such as occlusion or overlap, there occurs a sudden spate of drawings in which the newly discovered device is used extensively. This is a little like language acquisition, in which a newly discovered linguistic rule is used at every opportunity (Chomsky, 1966). Ben continues to develop and coordinate different ways of showing depth relations. He gradually unites different systems, and starts to use the oblique line unequivocally to represent, what is, in reality, an horizontal edge (the top of the train carriage in Figure 81, for example) receding from a notional viewer. However, it should not be thought that development is a single linear pathway toward showing depth relations in pictures. Although showing depth and volume in drawing becomes important to many children, the drawing surface is a

114

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 80

Figure 81

forum for many structural and infrastructural concerns (John Jessel, 1991, personal communication). Showing depth relations is only part of a larger project in which the drawing surface is redesigned to show more complex relationships —recession and procession being just one aspect. In Ben’s drawing, from 3 years 3 months to 4 years 6 months, shapes are stretched, curved back into themselves; shapes roll and fall. Height, length, depth, size, scale, motion, mass, stress, trajectory and moment-of-impact, are component elements in an ‘analogue’ space (Wolf, 1984, personal communication), designed with reference to the constraints of the medium itself. He does not always plan the drawings, but moves fluidly from one drawing to another, constantly pouring out structures which transform in their making; becoming objects which unfurl into events, which reform again into interlocking flat shapes on the drawing surface. New configurations appear in a constant process of evolution and devolution. When he draws living things and people, the contours bend and wrap themselves through space. These forms are not best evaluated in terms of distortions, as measured against a model of naïve realism, but are rather the result of Ben’s effort to imbue them with life. The topologically undulating, sinuous line which links forms together in space and time captures ideas about distance as well as depth between and within forms. In capturing the topology of movement, he arrives at the contours of surfaces. One characteristic of fluent draughtspersons is that they experience enjoyment and interest in the double play, or ‘double-knowledge’ (Furth, 1969), of the structures in themselves and their simultaneous allusion to other spaces. It is not just the outcome of depth relations which is of interest, but the fact that these depth relations are reliant on the nesting together of a family of devices, including shape variation, projection systems, texture gradients and other structures. These drawings show a fluid interaction between the structure of objects or events (whether actual, hypothesized or remembered) and the demands of the medium. This awareness is highly developed in Ben’s drawing but, with appropriate teaching, many children may gradually coordinate configurative, dynamic, kinaesthetic and physical aspects of events and objects in relation to the medium.

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

115

This flow of structure depends on permutations of a small family of shapes and structural principles I have discussed, including: closure, controlled contour variation, accretion of closed U-shapes on baseline, U-shape upon U-shape, Ushapes that can be bent or stretched. Other structural principles are angular variation, including its use in the attachment of lines and the making of corners and multiple polygonal shapes. Other family relatives are sinusoidal lines: core and radial, compass-array structures, rightangular grids, travelling zigzag, spirals, partitioning of shapes, division and subdivision. All these devices can be combined and synthesized to refer to an enormous range of objects and events or they can be explored as structures in themselves. To a certain extent, the subject matter is a vehicle or pretext for the manipulation of structure. It is really the structural investigation which allows the later, more explicit descriptions of space and depth to occur. The pedagogical implications of this are very important. Interaction and Provision Occasionally I do a drawing for Ben, and for the other children I have taught, but I mould my own production on their own drawings, perhaps adding a new element which I anticipate they might adapt and adopt. Sometimes Ben will complete one of my drawings. But my physical drawing for him is rare and its influence, though important, is only a part of a much larger encompassing discourse. This includes conversation and a careful vocabulary, in which the events on the drawing surface are described as accurately as possible, and in which I make a clear distinction between description of two-dimensional events, and description of events in the world. This larger, all embracing ambience includes interpersonal actions ranging from the subtlest facial or gestural expression, to conversations which are essentially philosophical and psychological. The main influence then, is conversation, and the provision of opportunities for structural investigation. Ben’s series of imaginary figures, from 4 years 4 months to 4 years 6 months, are structures which are designed with reference to the drawing surface (Figures 82, 83, 84). They are essentially an interplay between the flatness and linearity of the contoured shapes in themselves, plus their allusion to things within a hypothesized world. To use Piagetian terminology, there is a balance between assimilation and accommodation. The drawings of ‘Pirates Fighting’ (Figures 86, 87, 88) are made by Ben at 4 years 6 months. In these, he uses dynamic shapes in which he plays with the interaction and permutation of polygonal and curvilinear shapes. Later, we will consider some rather poor ways in which children are unfortunately introduced to Euclidean geometry. In Ben’s spontaneous interplay, ‘rigid’ geometry is transformed into fluidity because he has been allowed the freedom to construct polygonal shapes from energetic impulses in direction changes of the pen, which are partially the result of exuberant self-expression, but are also intended to convey the dynamism of events. In between bouts of drawing, Ben jumps up and enacts the bouts of fighting between opposing pirates. He adopts some of the complex poses, feeling what these are like; and he screws up his eyes in simulated pain. Returning to the drawing surface, he brings this proprioceptive and kinaesthetic information to influence the direction changes and the intensity of the drawing, translating the pained but muted cries he uttered, moments ago, and the twisted forms of his body, into variations in amplitude and stress. Note, for example, the unusual configuration of the eyes in the pirate in Figure 86, who, having been struck by his assailant’s cutlass, screws up his eyes in pain. Thus, we are not here looking at distorted forms, the result of ‘production or performance problems’. It is actually only a naive realism which assumes that forms in the external world, including human anatomy, have a fixed shape and proportion. Once something is in motion, its shape transforms, and the same is true of changing viewpoints, which of course are also the result of movement. One of the influences of this time are naturalistically painted pictures of pirates from children’s encyclopaedias, and from a book about pirates from the ‘Ladybird’ series. As with all other children, Ben’s use of these ready-made images is not simply to ‘copy’ them, but is an active process of reconstruction. Another influence is a cardboard suit of armour I make for him at Christmas time. The forms in this costume, especially of the helmet with its red plume, and sword, the hilt of which is studded with toy jewels of red, blue and green, are very noticeable in many of his drawings at this

116

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 82

Figure 83

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

117

Figure 84

Figure 85

time. Object-centred knowledge and conceptualized understandings drive transformations of graphic structure already in his repertoire. These include such relations as in-front-of and behind. For example, one shoe passing behind another and reappearing derives from experiences of the movements of objects passing momentarily out-of-sight (Figure 88). In earlier paintings and drawings, objects are described as being out-of-sight, or hidden, by the physical, concealing nature of pigment itself. Like all other conceptualizations, it is demonstrated physically before it is represented by the denotational and transformational values of lines and shapes alone. In these pirate drawings, Ben is learning to represent this relationship with the use of occlusion and hidden line elimination. This development occurs in drawings which occur within hours of each other. In the first drawings, he simply superimposes one shape over another. As I mentioned earlier, this is sometimes misleadingly termed an x-ray

118

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 86

Figure 87

Figure 88

effect—misleading because the term suggests an error has been made. This is a naive way of thinking. There is no reason why one should not superimpose forms one over another. If we consider the drawings as a window opening on the sequence of Ben’s thinking, then this probably serves him as a preliminary level of description. The next step is taken when Ben realizes that certain lines are not, in fact, required. In the second drawing in the series (Figure 87), the legs of the pirates are superimposed one over another, but the distant ship, to the righthand side, has its mast partially occluded by the shape of one pirate’s arm; a shape which interrupts our line-of-sight to the mast. In this way, spatial relationships before and behind are disambiguated. In the last drawing of this session (Figure 88), he uses occlusion and hidden line elimination throughout, concealing the further pirate’s body and most of his legs. He understands how to avoid what has been termed ‘false attachment’ (when nearer and further shapes unintentionally appear joined), and uses a small—but essential—curved line to separate the further pirate’s arm from the nearer. Ben also coordinates other devices which also allude to point-of-view. Earlier on, we have seen how he uses a closed shape to represent planes seen at 90 degree line of sight, or ‘face-on’, and lines which he uses to show planes seen at 0 degrees, or ‘edgeon’. Now, this device is used to show planes which can be rotated through 90 degrees, to represent hilts of swords shown completely foreshortened, or ‘face-on’ (Figure 88). He combines this device with others (occlusion, hidden line elimination) to create a more complete allusion to depth.

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

119

Figure 89

Children bring together many different influences, including exemplars from the pictorial environment, and unite and transform these through their own internal patterns of search. The nature of the schemas allows this to happen. For example, ‘Join-the-Dots’ pictures in children’s comics influence one part of Figure 86. This structure is originally based upon the attractor of collinearity which develops in infancy, when children break down continuous contact lines into series of points. Sometimes they connect them with a line which runs through them. This join-the-dots effect perhaps also accounts for the strange shape beneath the pirates’ feet in Figure 86, which may be a shadow. A shadow beneath a pair of fighting pirates is very prominent in an illustration in the ‘Ladybird’ pirate picture book. The use of the dots may be a way of showing the indefinite nature of a shadow. In a drawing of 4 years, we see dotted lines being used to show sections or boundaries perhaps considered too insubstantial to warrant a continuous line. Here, a pirate moves through the passage formed between two dotted lines which convey a different kind of boundary, less tangible than a visible one above ground and therefore rendered with the more hesitant dotted line, a suggestion rather than statement. As I mentioned earlier, John Willats has suggested that an important developmental move occurs when children transform the denotational values of lines from the representation of the boundaries of regions, to the representation of occluding contours and interior edges (Willats, 1997). This allows children to make more specifications about viewpoint relative to objects. As I have written above, my observations of the spontaneous development of drawing suggest to me that very young children sometimes use lines to represent contours of regions in the visual field, or the contours of surfaces; or sometimes they capture the shapes within objects, but not necessarily as views of those shapes. We have already noted that it is not always a simple matter for us to decode the precise denotational values of the lines used to make those closed shapes. My studies do support the idea that, generally, children update the denotational values of lines so that they now represent interior edges and occluding contours of objects. This helps children further disambiguate objects. Ben’s development from about 5 years to 6 years 6 months of age is a good example. Although this sequence appears in Ben’s drawing from 5 years onwards, it is typical of the moves older children and adolescents make in their drawing development. In a stunning series of drawings, we see Ben gradually encoding more information about projective relations (Figures 96–100). The general sequence in the articulation of threedimensional forms onto the flat surface, seems to run like this: the first three-dimensional volumes he seems to encode are cuboidal objects; the second type are cones and cylinders; the third, half-spheres; and finally, the complete sphere is mastered. As I will shortly explain more fully, there is a developmental reason for the order of this sequence. Cuboidal forms, because they have clear interior edges, are the easiest forms to construct along straight axes which run back through the picture plane, describing flat planes. From these, he derives all manner of flat planes which can be thought to represent flat ‘slices’ of space. Second in terms of difficulty is the cone, because it has two flat, planar axes, one curved—its top—and one flat—its base. The drawing of cylindrical forms occurs at around this time. Third in level of difficulty is the half-sphere which only has one planar axis, its base. Last of all is the sphere, a difficult object to draw because normally it has no interior contour lines,

120

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

and requires a system which specifies or suggests a continuous, infinite series of ellipses running around a common centre. We will now go through this developmental sequence in more detail. The representation of the two key orientations, edge-on/face-on, paves the way for the more systematic construction of cuboidal objects. What seems to happen is that these discoveries are not made singly or all at once, but comprise a coming together of many discoveries. For example, cuboidal forms may utilize several earlier discoveries, those in which polygonal and rectangular shapes are captured, and those discoveries about key positions edge-on/face-on. In the light of new discoveries, Ben seems to actively deconstruct and reconstruct graphic structures already in his possession. With appropriate teaching, other children may also reach this position. For example, cuboidal forms initially derived from object-centred descriptions may be taken apart and rethought when the implications and possibilities dawn on the child of edge-on/face-on planes or ‘slices’ of space. This is not a uniform development. It involves different but interrelated developmental trajectories of different projective devices, including occlusion, obliquity, convergence, texture gradients, optical size diminution or magnification etc., but no individual member of this family is developed or applied uniformly. For example, Ben might be able to show key positions edge-on and face-on with some objects but not with others; he will be able to show occlusion with some objects but not with others. The nature of the content or the type of structure he wants to represent, and how he conceptualizes it, affects his orientation to the drawing and influences the strategies he develops and deploys. All of these different developmental trajectories are finally coordinated and combined, to make a coherent representation of projective space. But just to see the complexity of the issue, and why a unitary explanation of development is just not possible, let us backtrack in time just a little and consider some examples. Belts, Brims, Visors and Spectacles Threaded through this development is an interest in showing forms which go around another object, or pass behind another object and reappear. We have already seen examples of this in Ben’s drawing of the pirates’ shoes and legs (see p. 119). These are based upon the logical sequencing of passages of movement. This interest paves the way for his gradual encoding of depth relations. Other examples of things which encircle appear in Ben’s drawings from 4 years 4 months; these include belts, hat brims, helmet visors and spectacles (see Figures 82, 83, 85, 92). He is thinking about forms which go around one side, travel out of sight and return around the front, once more returning into sight. This is the use of occlusion and hidden line elimination. It is worth noting however, that strictly ‘visual realism’ is not the aim here, which should make us cautious about ascribing terms like ‘view-specific’ information either here or in other examples. The use of such depth cues certainly does describe going around forms, going behind, out-of-sight on one side, and coming out, reappearing on the other, but such devices derive from an earlier interest and understanding of passages of movement in- and out-of-sight. Much of this understanding is formed in those early plays in infancy; for example, when Keira predicts the occluding balloon momentarily interrupts the passage of her father’s face. The issue now is to map this understanding of passages of movement behind occluding forms in three dimensions of space plus the dimension of time, onto the two-dimensional drawing surface. Cylindrical Forms Consider the belt in Figure 82, a drawing made at 4 years 5 months, about a month before the pirate drawings. If one draws a strip, like a belt, in perspective, or in another projective system, it has to appear to wrap around a form, disappearing behind that form and then reappearing, using the same system, reversed, on the other side of the occluding form. To draw this requires the use of a denotation system in which lines denote interior edges and occluding contours,

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

121

a system which Ben, at about 4 years 5 months, only partially understands and uses. Ben has curled the belt around, but has maintained both its continuous curve and its width. To turn this belt around in a perspectival mode would require a sophisticated system of occlusion, in which a straight line represents the vertical width of the belt—the occluding boundary of a strip curling away, out-of-sight of the viewer. Of course, if the belt adhered to the body of the figure, then he might fortuitously arrive at a notional projection of the belt going-around. Simply by drawing a line across the chest, dividing chest or shirt, from legs or trousers, may result in this implication. In other parts of the drawing, he uses this sort of device, for example with the tops of boots. But he does not do this here. A belt, wrapping around a figure, can be thought of as a short cylinder but there are difficulties involved in turning a cylinder through successive momentsof-turn. John Willats’s theory about the use of lines as interior and occluding edges is relevant here, but it is not simply the case that Ben is unable to use lines as occluding boundaries, for we have seen that, in other contexts, he is able to do this. In this situation, Ben wants to think of the belt as an object, going-around. He is not conceptualizing a belt as a cylinder, but thinking of it in terms of a strip. For this reason, he has preserved its width. As we have noted, this development is not unitary, linear or homogenous. Figures 82, 83, 84 are all made within a few days of each other, yet projective relations are not mapped uniformly across different objects within the drawings. It is interesting that in another drawing made a few days later (Figure 85), he is able to show, in projective geometry, a brim which goes around the crown of a hat. There is an interesting mixture of fantasy and reality in this drawing. A group of climbers gradually make their way to the summit of a rock, and the victorious leader raises his arms in a hearty cheer; Red Indians shoot arrows from canoes in the rapids; whilst a cowboy hides behind a wagon wheel. This detail is influenced by a ‘Wagon Wheel’ biscuit wrapper, which bore the classic image. This is one of a few ready-made images (and there are not that many) which Ben increasingly visually analyses. There is also a beautifully drawn horse. In spite of this realism, he is quite happy to place a Sheriff’s hat, complete with Sheriff’s star and gun holsters, around the sun, because, he explains, ‘It is in cowboy country’. We have to be careful in how we understand, what is, for the child, real and what is not. Leaving aside for the moment the implications of the fusion of reality and fantasy, let us consider some formal aspects of the drawing. There are, in fact, several instances in this drawing of going-around, each one of a different kind. There are reins around a horse, a lariat goes around the sun’s face, and gun holsters and the hat brim around the sun. The lariat goes around longitudinally, or face-on to a notional viewer, whilst the brim revolves foreshortened. In a single drawing, Ben differentiates the ways in which different objects might ‘go-around’. The change of immediate local context also allows him to use the same type of line to show an edge, a rope or a rein. Consider the brim of the hat. The brim is a circular slice of space. It is a circle which he shows as an ellipse. This means he is realizing that the width of the shape of an object may be narrowed and distorted as it turns away from a faceon position. This brim’s boundary edge is denoted by a line that can pass in and out of sight behind a form which interrupts momentarily our line of sight to it. In this instance, he is using lines to show interior edges of forms (Willats, 1997). He avoids the use of interior contours in his drawing of the belt for the gun holsters by reducing it to a single line. In this way, he succeeds in making a belt go-around the form, using projective geometry. An interesting comparison can be made with Figure 83, another drawing produced at around this time. This is the ‘Strange Sailor with Glasses.’ This figure has spectacles which do indeed seem to curve around, out-of-sight, behind the sailor’s head. Like the belt of the gun holsters, perhaps this projective relation can be explained like this: the lateral supporting arms of spectacles are saliently one-dimensional, rod-like, so he can represent this thin region with a single line. This disposes of the conflict of information involved in drawing belts which he thinks of as two-dimensional objects on the drawing surface. Again, whether this is best described in Willats’s terms of the conflict between use of lines to show regions, and use of lines to show occluding boundaries, is debatable. Eight months later, he is successfully wrapping a string-like belt around a knight in armour, so has again avoided the problem of belts with width (Figure 92). However, notice that he has curved the visor of the knight’s helmet around a spherical surface. Like the belt, the visor may be thought of as a two-dimensional shape, but he has been successful in

122

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

making it appear to cohere to a curving surface. Perhaps the reason for his success lies in the way he conceptualizes this object, which is different from the way he conceptualizes a belt. Again we see that development of the representation of projective relations is not uniform, but rather involves different conceptualizations and strategies for different objects. How one plans and deploys drawing strategies depends to a certain extent initially on one’s conceptualization of the object to be drawn. Eventually, as we will see, space itself is conceptualized in a different way, uniting different objects within it, and overriding concerns about object-centred information. All of these different developmental trajectories are entwined together. Consider the drawing (Figure 84) which he makes a few days after both the ‘Strange Seafarer’ and the ‘Imaginary Creature with Belt’. This beautiful drawing shows an arrangement of figures that can only occur on the drawing surface; they balance like performers in some bizarre twoand-a-half-dimensional circus. His use of optical size scaling to show a distant castle is emblematic rather than realistic. This means that we, as adults, have to be cautious about the way we understand the way he is using spatial and depth relations. For the purposes of interpretation, naïve realism is totally inadequate as a model. Yet he does show depth and the articulation of notionally three-dimensional forms through space. Look especially at the fishtail and compare the way he has handled the drawing of arms going through the armholes of a waistcoat. The waistcoat is really an object-centred description; it is almost opened out like a dressmaker’s pattern. The experience of getting dressed is important here. The fishtail involves a movement which is complex enough, but not as complex as the understandings involved in drawing the structure of the waistcoat and its relationship to the wearer which involves coordinating going-through, with going around. Folds in Space With the fishtail in Figure 84, he uses a folded form, or cusp, to show spatial direction changes. Ben folds forms back on themselves to suggest depth back through the picture plane. We will shortly see him playing with variations on this structure. It is easier to construct, in depth, a flat form, like a strip, using a crease and folding it along a single vertex, than it is to make a flat form which continuously curves back from the picture plane, like a belt. The former requires a single change of direction from one straight axis; the latter requires a continuous and controlled change of direction in which moments-ofturn occur in an infinite series, progressively turning the strip away from the viewer and back away in the opposite direction. This is one of the reasons why even adolescents, when drawing the tops of cylinders or bottles, draw these with a sharp crease at each side, rather than a continuous ellipse. But whilst all this is going on, there is another line in Ben’s development, which we have already noted above, which involves a radical revolution in how he understands and uses the oblique line. From 4 years 3 months, through 4 years 4 months, we have seen Ben transforming the representational meaning of this line, so that it no longer represents a slope, but a horizontal edge which recedes from the notional viewer. This is also coupled with another device, and one that we have seen starts even earlier, and that is the use of optical or apparent size change to show depth. Another device which has also been developing since 3 years 3 months is edge-on and face-on, two key positions in moment-ofturn. Development seems to be a coming together of different discoveries. This, of course, assumes a special kind of supporting environment. As we study the drawings he makes from about 4 years 4 months, to 6 years, we see Ben gradually combining devices discovered separately, which each, in its own way, describes depth relations and specifies imaginary views. The projection of depth relations is emphasized and made especially powerful by the coordination of these different devices.

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

123

Imaginary Views As Ben starts to consider what the scene looks like from one position, so he starts to think about what the view would be like from all possible positions. Hence at age 4 years 3 months he gives us a fascinating ‘worm’s eye view’ of a giant about to step over some people (Figure 78). It might be thought that the reason the feet are proportionately larger in comparison to the rest of the figure is because of planning problems; that is, perhaps he draws the feet first without leaving sufficient space for the rest of the figure. Although this is often offered as an explanation for strange proportion effects, this is not the case with Ben. (I suspect that this is an inadequate explanation for apparent disproportion in children’s drawings generally.) In Ben’s case, he is specifically controlling optical size variation with the intention of creating an allusion to depth from an extremely low station-point. He is now finding ways of moving around a threedimensional space and viewing it, if not from every conceivable point, then at least from some key positions. Such abilities owe something to both the object manipulation and visual praxis developed in representational play with handheld toys, and also some picture books about giants. It is important to note that Linda and I discussed how these depictions work, focusing his attention on the basis of the system. These discussions would be animated, involving pantomimetic demonstrations of how to obtain a viewpoint; in this case, for example, by crouching down on the floor and looking up at the scene. But the child’s awareness of different viewing positions and the geometry of the visual array from a single stationpoint, is not sufficient, in itself, to explain children’s development in visual representation (Willats, 1997). The array has to be translated in lines and shapes. Nor is simply possessing the books usually enough; the child needs guided explorations and discussion with an intelligent companion. Merely citing the availability of images, as so many writers do, as an explanation of ‘cultural variation’ is not in itself sufficient; it is the articulation and discussion of the implicit systems which the child needs. Pictures might be easy to see—but they are hard to understand (LangeKuettner and Thomas, 1995). Other low-angle views of giants appear in drawings at this time. Sometimes they are seen airborn on small flying platforms. In one fascinating drawing, made at age 4 years 3 months (Figure 79), a large, elongated closed shape represents the giant’s crown, which is being carried from the hatchway of a spacecraft by diminutive people. Some of the little people who carry the crown are partially occluded from our sight by the large object—we can only see the bottom of their legs sticking out from underneath the crown. The story is that these people will carry this large object so that it will eventually reach the giant’s head which is a tiny closed shape at the top left of the picture (Matthews, 1994a). The conscious use of such vast disparity in the actual physical sizes of the two different closures is extremely revealing. Although the crown is perhaps hundreds of times larger than the closure representing the giant’s head, Ben is playing with this apparent or optical size difference to stretch the spatial depth to extremes. There is a real attempt to organize the range of distances between nearest and farthest points. The giant’s high-heeled boots appear bigger than his head too, though not nearly as large as the crown. He is using apparent size difference to show the distance between the various objects within the picture and a notional observer. It is also interesting that Ben links nearest and furthest parts of the scene with a line along which the crown is imagined to move. The line moves to the left, up onto a series of rotating shelves, and along a line which the giant holds with an arm which reaches directly to his head, linking him to the rotating shelf-machine. My studies show that the representation of depth and an overall three-dimensional space is assisted by the child imagining and trying to represent directions of movement running through it. Connectivity and linear direction are still being used to support a narrative which now involves complex depth relations. Notice that because Ben has imagined the giant’s feet as close to the viewer, the feet are spaced apart. The shapes representing the legs, starting from the stretched apart feet, necessarily follow a converging path toward the Giant’s body or head. This is another consequence of controlled size scaling. The act of attaching the spaced apart, large feet to the legs, which are then attached to body, which in turn is linked to the small head, necessitates a convergence of lines toward the head. This creates a near one-point linear perspective similar to that implicit in the inevitable convergence of line in graded

124

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

size diminution of the steam engines in Figure 77 (p. 115). Thus, the gradual projection of depth relations onto the drawing surface can be described in developmental terms. I have observed children drawing ‘made’ and ‘carpentered’ objects, and one of children’s intentions may be to show the ‘best’ views of these things, but what about irregular objects; those which do not slice through space in an orderly, measurable, predictable way? What are the ‘best’ views of things like clouds, or waves? These representations are altogether more hazy and fluid—respectively! It would seem that for some forms of representation, it is not the exact visual shape that is the crucial factor. Again, it may be our relationship to such phenomena, which is the crucial determinant in how the representations are organized. Divers and sailors may form more complex representations of clouds and waves, but for most people, most of the time, a general representation of ‘cloudiness’ or ‘waviness’ will suffice. Figure 89 shows a very amorphous object indeed; a stormy sea on which are tossed Spanish galleons. Even in this turbulent object, Ben (4 years 6 months) uses occlusion and hidden line elimination. In this stormy scene, occlusion is useful to show rearing, mountainous waves occluding patches of driving rain. In this picture, the use of optical or apparent size difference is inverted, with a ship in the foreground depicted smaller than one in the background. Now it may be that the ships are intended to be of physically different sizes, or else the difference in apparent size is simply not important to him or, possibly, attentional difficulties have caused him to accidentally invert the axis of diminution. Probably, there is no clear-cut distinction between accident and intention. My feeling about effects like this is that the strategies he deploys are strongly influenced by the subject matter, and that he intuitively works within the ambiguities which arise if these afford credible visual information. This is one of many types of visual representations in which ambiguity is helpful, rather than a hindrance, to recovery of the forms in the picture. Clear, stable, unambiguous, perspectival relationships on a rough sea are unlikely—ask anyone who suffers from seasickness. The sea has been varied considerably out of the flat plane, so that depth between objects has been changed. The effect is of ships swallowed in the troughs of huge waves, between maxima and minima of this undulating surface. The waves themselves owe a great deal to action representation (Ben uses body actions and sound effects whilst he draws the turbulence of water) but they are now defined in configurative terms, rather than being the residual effects of action representation. Some approaches to teaching children art prohibit such configurations. Once you have forced children into, for example, a rigid Euclidean mode, this discourages the necessary experimentation required to arrive at the spatial fluency present in this and other pictures. The freedom to distort, stretch, bend and twist polygonal shapes has helped Ben to master the direction changes in the complex polygonal shapes of a complex battle scene he produced at this age of 4 years 6 months (Figure 91). These abrupt direction changes in line are not distortions of form but, like those employed in his ‘Fighting Pirates’ series, are derived from earlier linear polygonal action representations, in which the fast moving pen or pencil point starts and stops, switching direction in time to agonistic facial expressions and vocalizations. In several parts of this drawing, he makes sudden folds in space, where a shape meets a vertex and at this cusp abruptly changes direction in space. This will shortly be of great use to him when they are developed to become affine transformations which can be manipulated to show depth into a supposed third dimension. Using the Edges of the Drawing Surface to Select a Sample of an Imagined Visual Array Another battle scene uses the edges of the drawing surface themselves to occlude the major part of an imagined scene (Figure 90). Here the rectangular drawing surface itself is used to select a sample of the visual array, rather like the viewfinder of a camera, leaving the major part of the scene to be imagined by the viewer. This device is commonplace enough in a world of images, but for children to achieve this in depiction requires them to make a leap in conceptualization. Again, mere exposure to pictures that select and frame a view in this way will not in itself cause children themselves to produce this device. This is because of the way children conceptualize objects and their representation. Figure 90 is very unusual for a child as young as 4 years 6 months. Usually, young children use the drawing surface as a

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

125

Figure 90

Figure 91

Figure 92

physical target on which everything they are considering is shown, like a small playground in which two-dimensional events happen continuously. The notion of cutting off part of the scene by the edges of the picture surface requires a revolution in how the picture is conceptualized. It requires the child to have at least a vague interiorized representation of the scene, in order that these can be occluded by the edges. The reluctance to use the drawing surface as a sample of the visual array is related to the earlier reluctance to partially occlude objects and to use the device of hidden line elimination. Very young children have reluctance in overlapping forms, because this means sacrificing their understanding of the coherent, unbroken boundaries of objects. Occlusion and hidden line elimination completely sabotage their knowledge about the object as a coherent whole. In order that these earlier understandings of the coherence and identity of form are preserved requires a new understanding about view-

126

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 93

specific relationships on the drawing surface and a hypothesized viewer’s relationship to it. It is really only at this point that we can truthfully speak of visual representations as ‘pictures’. Even though this use of the drawing surface is so basic to picturing, even adolescents sometimes have difficulties with it. My experience suggests that this may be a product of a lack of experience with visual media and lack of appropriate discussion with informed adults. Ben and I have conversations about pictures and how they function, and these assist his understanding of the picture as a sample of a much larger visual array. From about 2 years and 6 months, when we look at ‘Rupert Bear’ picture books together, Ben asks questions about how the individual pictures or frames work. In a particular picture, a partial view of Rupert might be shown, one in which, say, his legs are occluded by the edges of the drawing frame itself. Ben asks, ‘Why hasn’t Rupert got any legs?’ I then offer explanations to him intended to help his understanding of the conventions of this pictorial device: ‘Well, imagine the picture is like a window and we cannot see Rupert’s legs because they are below the edge of the window sill’. Actually, this is essentially how western artists, since the Renaissance, conceptualized the picture surface, and Ben readily understands these explanations. Other young children, too, quickly understand this explanation of the picture surface. In the drawing in Figure 90, Ben (4 years 6 months) has completely reconceptualized the drawing surface in terms of a sample of an imagined visual array. Swords are thrust outside the frame of the picture, and unseen protagonists thrust their swords into the picture. The framing effects of this view-selection resemble that of the camera. We do not possess a television set at this time, but Ben has seen one film, at the cinema, ‘Jason and the Argonauts’. This experience really impresses him. There is one moment when he starts to duck behind the seat in front of him as a monster looms up on the screen. I do my best to explain that a picture is being ‘shone’ onto the screen, from the projector, and Ben is reassured. From this time, the cinematic effects are notable in his drawings, including, later on, the use of changes from long shot to medium shot. Again, this influence does not run counter to an internally generated representational programme, nor does it rely on the mere availability of the film medium. His understanding and use of changes of ‘shot’ are assisted by my explanations. He also uses texture gradients or increased close-up detail to disambiguate foreground from background—we are so close up that we can see the pimples and scars on the face of the man closest to us. Texture gradients are now coupled with apparent or optical size difference and used to great effect in other pictures a few months later. For example, in ‘Red Indian Walking Towards You’ (Figure 93), produced at 5 years 1 month, the nearest foot of the Native American looms up close to us, its apparent size dwarfing the further foot. This sensation of closeness is augmented by his depiction of the patterning on this nearer moccasin.

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

127

Figure 94

Ben is already playing games with the denotational values of lines. In Figure 90, the man in the extreme foreground wears a helmet. We can see the embossed pattern in the metal crest. It recalls the detail I put into the armour I made for him. Behind this helmet a horizon line passes, momentarily occluded. On this distant horizon line, two figures are fighting. The one on our right raises his right leg for the final onslaught and puts his heel down on what might be the ground or baseline but which is the line Ben has already used to denote the top of the helmet crest. This means that the line which represents the top of his helmet doubles up in denotational value to represent a convenient hillock on which a distant figure can rampage. This ambiguity is an impossible effect, one which can only occur in the world of picturing. Artists sometimes call this ‘false attachment’ and it is normally to be avoided. It might be that this denotational indeterminacy or ambiguity is inadvertent; the result of an attentional difficulty occurring in the instant of drawing, the line standing for the top of the helmet presenting itself as a convenient baseline on which to attach the L shape of the foot. We have seen such irresistible targets presenting themselves in earlier drawings. However, we know that in drawings made just a few days before, for example in Figure 88 (‘Pirates Fighting’), he has specifically avoided such instances of denotational indeterminacy. So, it is quite possible that it is intentional. Ben may be purposely playing with representational affordances. Development in drawing skills is not merely the accumulation of a repertoire of effects to show three-dimensional space. This development also involves the ever more conscious realization and articulation of infrastructural constraints and possibilities to comment on the process itself. This means that at 4 years 6 months, Ben is already using art to reflect upon art. This is part of the process of metacognition and is more fully developed during adolescence. In Figure 94, ‘Cyclists Coming Towards You’, drawn by Ben at 5 years 1 month, shows an edge-on, or front view, of cycles and their riders coming straight towards the notional viewer. The factors which may elicit one or other approach to visual descriptions of objects are very complex, involving the nature and identity of the object as well as its shape in purely formal terms. (Compare this drawing with the visual description of a bicycle in Figure 54, p. 90.)

128

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 95

Partly due to the possibilities of the drawing medium, partly to do with the way we may form generalized internal representations of objects, certain key positions are easier to represent than other views. With roughly flat objects, there are usually two key positions at 90 degrees to each other, edge-on and face-on. These are usually represented in children’s drawings before any of the moments-of-turn in between. To rotate a flattish object (if you will accept that a bicycle may be generalized to a ‘flat’ object) through a continuous series of visual transformations between these two key positions presents more difficulties. As the visual angle subtended to the eye moves through a continuous flow of changes it may be difficult to visualize and calibrate on paper, a continuum of gradual, subtle transformations of shape, of which expansion or contraction of width are but two. This seems to be true of the 2–5-year-olds I studied in Singapore, drawing the wide-brimmed straw hat (see p. 73). It may be that we have a few generalizable categories of internal represen-tation into which the range of images within the perceptual flow are sorted (Koenderink and van Doorn, 1977). Key positions in the movement of roughly planar objects might constitute such generalized categories. It is possible to rotate other objects through different moments-of-turn, however. In a drawing he makes at 5 years 4 months (Figure 95), for example, he draws a distant, partially foreshortened view of a cylinder; the cannon firing a cannonball. However, even though he shows depth relations, Ben’s earlier understandings of the causal relations within events still dominate his thinking. The swash-buckler here is saying, ‘Aha there, Pirates’. On questioning him about the inverted letters and words, he explains: ‘Oh, they come out of his mouth that way’. Here, his understandings of the passage of words from a mouth to a listener is still inscribed in one of the earliest understandings about directions of

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

129

Figure 96

Figure 97

travel. This passage of movement of words from a mouth is akin in all important respects to that of the cannonball from the cannon (Matthews, 1994a). Such examples, should make us wary again about thinking that the child’s understanding of realism is the same as an adult’s (Vygotsky, 1986). From about 5 years 6 months Ben becomes increasingly fascinated with showing recession back through the picture plane. Gradually, he organizes a variety of depth cues, along with other features, including mass, motion, velocity, into a coherent coordinate frame. Part of his pleasure is now gained by deferment, as he integrates component elements toward the envisaged moment when allusion to depth and space will appear. This would suggest he has now a stronger memory and is able to forward plan. He perhaps increasingly interiorizes a three-dimensional environment in which the station-point coalesces into a singularity, rather than a generalized view or multiplicity of views. This means that he tries to iron out spatial and other ambiguities that arise in the drawing process. By 6 years 6 months to 6 years 11 months, in his ‘Star Wars’ and other drawings (Figures 96–104), he is able to rotate an object through successive momentsof-turn. Remember that such abilities are prefaced in significant

130

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 98

Figure 99

Figure 100

experiences with angular momentum and moment-of-turn. For example, from about 2 years and 7 months, Hannah, Joel and Ben not only play with real doors, and clearly take great pleasure in seeing their movement sweep through a half-circle; they also use other objects to represent doors being opened and closed. For example, in plays by Joel, at about 3 years of age, a table fork is used to span the gap between two objects as if it were a gate. He rotates the fork from its blunt end, which remains at one position, allowing or preventing cars from passing through between the two objects. All my children at around 3 years of age also pivot their own bodies, with arms outstretched, and with one hand maintaining a fixed position, pretending to be doors, which only open if one gives the correct ‘password’.

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

131

Figure 101

Figure 102

Planes, Cubes, Cones, Hemispheres and Spheres Now we have reached the point when we can bring together Ben’s discoveries and describe how he shows classical solids in an allusion to three-dimensional space. Although this is one case study, Ben moves through a process whose general principles can be seen in the development of other children, although usually during older childhood and adolescence. Ben masters planar objects and cuboidal objects first, followed by cones, hemispheres and finally spheres. There are reasons why this progression might be true of other children too. Flat planes seem to be the easiest shape towards which to generalize objects. This is perhaps because they describe, by definition, a single, flat slice through space. As we have seen, Ben can fold, twist and bend these to suggest pathways of movement through space. He gradually imagines a flat plane being slowly rotated so that its visual angle subtends increasingly smaller or bigger visual angles at the eye. He learns to shrink or increase the width of rectangular planes in this way. He can squeeze squares into parallelograms, trapesiums or rhomboids. The earlier realization that rectangles may be distorted, with oblique rather than vertical or horizontal sides, and without right-angular corners, and yet still describe rectangles in the real world, has been a forerunning discovery. Look, for example, at the way he can swivel a flat plane around in the wings or vanes of spacecraft in Figure 102, drawn at 6 years 11 months. Ben possesses toy spacecraft which are small replicas of those in the ‘Star Wars’ movie. But he at no time draws these directly from observation in the sense of working from a stilllife group. He becomes acquainted with the multitude of visual transformations in his hand-held play with them, as he makes them revolve upon

132

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 103

Figure 104

their own axes, and as he moves them through swooping parabolas, sometimes closing one eye to obtain a monocular image. These strategies are exactly those employed by the 4-year-old Singaporean boy and girl in Chapter 5 (see p. 50). The skateboarders in Figure 101, (drawn at 6 years 10 months) are another subject in which Ben can demonstrate his newly emerging ability to move through to a variety of station-points and imagine what the view would be like. The skateboarders’ bodies have been reduced to flat planes or curled strips—although they are still very complex. The supporting influences here include his actual skateboarding, an obsession during this period (part of a continuum of interest in the motion of wheeled objects, which will later, during teenage life, extend to racing cycles and roller-blades and, in young adulthood, include mono-cycling). An intuitive but intimate knowledge is formed of the physical laws involved in skateboarding; of momentum, inertial forces, and the consequences of collision. Other influences include ready-made images, photographs and drawings of skateboarders. One such found image is an ice-lollipop wrapper, in which a view of a skateboarder is depicted. Ben does not copy directly from this. Interestingly, the depicted view on the ice-lolly wrapper is not quite like the view Ben depicts, but is perhaps described as belonging to a set or family of views

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

133

Figure 105

like those general views speculated by Koenderink and Van Doorn (1977). This suggests that Ben is increasingly able to rotate scenes through various positions. From Single Faces to Multiple Faces It would seem that single, flat planes are mastered first, so that Ben can draw objects and people as if they are made of flat strips. The next step is when additional planes are joined on, making faceted structures which start to suggest threedimensional shapes. My observations in primary and secondary schools suggest this progression might be generalizable to other children. By 6 years 11 months, he has mastered all degrees of turn of flat planar objects and, coupled with the other devices, he can depict a very convincing impression of infinite depth in these stunning space pictures. The ability to see that planar forms may be articulated through an imagined third dimension allows him to make, at 7 years 1 month, the visual joke in Figure 105, ‘A Motor-Bike Made Completely Out of Bananas’. The bananas have been resolved to irregular shaped planes which fold back in space. Bananas, being noncarpentered forms, allow Ben greater freedom in articulating the planes to construct credible forms. The piecing together of other non-carpentered objects— which though complexly faceted, are nonetheless irregular objects—allows him some freedom in constructing other imaginary objects. These discoveries about faceted, planar objects are assisted by constructions he makes in paper and cardboard. As his Lego and block sculptures made between 2 years 7 months and about 4 years 4 months informed his drawings about movements through Euclidean axes, so these cardboard sculptures now help his understanding of a new kind of geometry in which forms fold, wrap and curl around in space. Beginnings of Linear Perspective From about 6 years 6 months also, he is trying to construct cuboidal objects as though articulated through three dimensions. In some drawings, he may still be slightly puzzled as to where the orthogonal lines should terminate, or else there may be other ambiguities in drawings as he tries to combine different depth cues, or else purposely experiments with ‘impossible’ combinations. This may not really be an issue, as long as a ‘credible’ view arises (Duthie, 1985). These are typically adolescent concerns which appear precociously in Ben’s drawings.

134

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

By 7 years 7 months, however, the orthogonals on his spacecraft are converging at optical infinity. Look at the carefully varied visual angles of the articulated vane or wing of the spacecraft in Figure 103. His abandonment of the drawing in its incomplete state is itself significant. He does not know how the orthogonals of the fai vane of the spacecraft can be made to cohere to the same projective system. He is almost at the point of being able to construct a linear perspective model. The fact that he has abandoned one wing of the spacecraft shows that he is aware of these new geometrical rules but does not quite know how to execute them. Cones and Half Spheres Spheres take a little longer to master. His representation of cones and half-spheres constitute two of the stages en route. A cone is a part-way stage to drawing a sphere, consisting of a strip, curled around a central point and with a flat base. The cone has two major axes, its flat base and its triangular shape. For many young children, the representation of such an object presents a potential contradiction because of the difficulty of combining these two different aspects in two dimensions. We saw different solutions to this when children drew the wide-brimmed hat with its cone-shaped crown, but there are many other examples in children’s drawing in which there is a similar competition between different axes of objects. In Ben’s drawing of the cone-shaped flying saucer (Figure 98), he finds ways of resolving the apparent conflict between two opposing axes which comprise the same object. Ben has found how to draw flat planes which project away through the picture plane. One way to draw the base of the flying saucer in linear perspective is to imagine it as a circular shape resting on a flat plane inclined away from a notional viewer. He is already able to draw rectangular and other planar shapes receding from the viewer, so now he has to conceive of a circle going away from him. Often, when children draw circular objects which recede back though the picture plane, they initially have difficulties in describing this recession in terms of a smooth, continuous curve. Even many adolescents’ drawings of foreshortened circles show a sudden cut-off at both sides, when the shape sharply switches direction and folds back on itself, making an ‘eye’-like shape. This is one of the reasons why the representation in two dimensions of rectangular, flat planar objects and cuboidal objects is mastered before the representation of spheres. Though this sharp, cut-off point is present in the base of Ben’s flying saucer, he does come some way to resolving this problem in another part of the drawing in which he describes a gradual, rather than abrupt, reversal of planar direction. He does this with the use of the device of the small rocket motors which rotate the flying saucer. The elliptical path of the rocket motors’ vapour trail is probably easier to achieve than trying to render the actual surface of the cone itself as a continuous curve. This is because the elliptical vapour trails stand a short distance away from the surface of the craft which means that it can be seen to disappear around the back of that form and re-emerge. It can be represented as a line passing in and out of sight behind a shape. In this way a continuous ellipse is implied. This solution also avoids his doing violence to his conceptualization of the flying saucer as a triangular shape. He is able to draw this because he is imagining the direction of travel of these vapour trails. This is built upon his understanding of trajectories. A little further down from the vapour trails, we can see the base of the flying saucer, not turning on a parallel elliptical path, but reduced to an acute angle. Information and conceptions about passages of movement and, by implication, the forms and surfaces of forms around which these movements occur, can gradually be updated in terms of surfaces which continuously curve back through the picture plane. For a short while, this new understanding will vie with other conceptualizations of form—in the present example, the conceptualization of the flying saucer as a triangular shape. He tries the half-sphere the very next day (Figure 99). With a half-sphere, one is required to imagine a more complex series of ellipses but, because it is cut in half, it presents one visible ellipse. This cuts the task in half, literally and conceptually. It is upon this fully visible ellipse that the semicircular top of the spacecraft can rest, and its domelike characteristic is implied by the ellipse underneath. It is the non-existence of any such visible ellipse which makes the full

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

135

sphere so hard to draw. The half-sphere has half the amount of lateral ellipses starting from the equator line and diminishing in radius as they move up to the point at the top pole. The textured ‘base’ of this half-sphere has not made Ben’s job easier. Ben has been able to make the complex texture of this base, which includes reiterated ellipses, approximately cohere to the same angle of projection. His drawing of a half-sphere and cone follow each other in quick succession and signal the systematicity of his investigation of visual structure. But most children exhibit this structural investigation. Ben is unusual only in terms of the degree of his involvement. He has remained interested in these representational issues because at no time have they been turned, by another, into problems, rather than interests. Both objects represent flying saucers, and the cone-shaped one is conveniently labelled U.F.O. —‘Unidentified Flying Object’! Interestingly, in classical drawing classes of the nineteenth century, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, students were often drilled tediously in the drawing of so-called classical solids, including the sphere, halfsphere, the cube and the cone. Such drilling was often destructive to learning, undermining creativity and stultifying development. Yet, in Ben’s drawings, though disguised as it were by their subject matter, we have the same classical solids. Ben is motivated to pursue these formal, structural concerns because they hang upon his interest in flying saucers. Spheres The artificial satellite, in Figure 97 (by Ben at 6 years 8 months), also derives from the ‘Star Wars’ movie and is called the ‘Death Star’. This drawing of a spherical object shows cut-off points to the lines which represent a groove or channel cut around the equator line of the sphere. In linear perspective, these lines would follow elliptical paths around the globe. In the same way as belts and other cylinders were folded along a crease or cusp, so the sphere also is tackled initially in this way, by an abrupt termination or implied sudden fold. When drawing this new object, he also reverts to an earlier reluctance to overlap its continuous contour, apart from the vapour trails of the spacecraft, which do seem to move around the sphere elliptically. But these of course are translucent, and so do not interrupt the boundary of the object. When children draw new objects, they need first of all to establish it as a coherent, bound form, before allowing any significant part of it to be occluded by another object. Notice, for example, how he only cautiously allows a floating astronaut to converge on the edge of the Death Star. This is because he does not want to damage its circularity which is the main aspect of its form to which he is initially attracted. It is its circularity plus its textured surface which have been salient to Ben here. The allusions to its three dimensions are notional—Ben is still in the process of accommodating to this additional complexity. Compare its form in space with that of the spacecraft in the top left. Here, the rectangular panels are folded into the third dimension of space, by affine transformations, shrinking the width and skewing them into parallelograms. Ellipses Disappearing and Reappearing In later drawings, made at 8 years 2 months, of this same sphere, he manages to preserve its circularity but combines with this a new understanding of how to render its spherical nature (for example, Figure 100). He does this by using a series of aligned disappearing curves to show the elliptical channel, incised around the sphere’s surface. This channel has salient topological and haptic qualities which are of great interest to many children and which is represented in many of their representations and discussions about the film. The carved groove in the spherical satellite is an important landmark in formal terms. As I noted above, one of the problems of drawing a sphere is the difficulty of imagining an infinite series of circles which run around the sphere and describe its form. In the half-sphere, there is at least the base, which cuts the sphere in half and shows up its threedimensional form. It is true that the ‘Death Star’ is not smooth but complexly textured, but this is a mixed blessing.

136

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 106

Unless one has a superb grasp of three-point linear perspective, the rendering of this interesting surface is likely to flatten the object, as it does in Figure 97. There is only one clear, striking surface feature which describes the spherical nature of the object. This is the channel or groove incised around the sphere. With the half-sphere, the base can be imagined as an equator line, with the bottom half of the globe cut away and discarded. What is required, in order to describe a sphere, is such an equator line, and a carved channel provides this. Additional longitudinal and latitudinal lines can be imagined and added to this landmark. The base of the groove is in some respects like an encircling ‘belt’, but whereas in Figure 97 the lines describe the groove as a region, in Figure 100 the drawing of the groove requires that he use lines to describe interior edges of surfaces, which disappear behind other surfaces, and as occluding boundaries which show the point at which a sur face curves away out of sight (Willats, 1997). In Figure 100 he has managed to show such a group of occluding contours and interior edges nested together. Ben is now mastering a spherical form whose description requires the conceptualization of an infinite, continuous series of ellipses running though an infinite, continuous series of axes, revolving around a common centre. The way he conceptualizes the object is at least partially bound up with his available modes of representation. In drawing the cone-shaped flying saucer, his understanding of triangularity was in conflict with his understanding of conical forms. In his first drawings of the ‘Death Star’, his understanding of circles vied with his understanding of spheres. Circle and triangle belong to Euclidean geometry; sphere and cone belong to projective geometry. Ben is now starting to understand a system in which Euclidean geometrical understandings are unified with projective geometry. Perspective and Drama By 9 years of age, an interest in historical events, which is to last him into adult life, emerges. He is learning at school about World War 2 and the Normandy landings. Some of his drawings at this time show a poignant awareness of the consequences of war (see Figure 106). From the earliest infancy we have seen that Ben is interested in the beginnings and ends of sequences; where things come from and where things go. This is a quest for answers to the problems of existence and non-existence, order and entropy, of life and death. Figure 106 is a continuation of that quest which is now transforming to metaphor. This drawing is called, ‘Dead Soldier Lies at the Edge of the Sea.’ His empty eyes staring up at the sky, his dead arm is flung to one side. Gentle waves wash him back and forth, back and forth. Ben is now able to image three-dimensional arrays from a multitude of stationpoints. He is now using a little, tentative shading to indicate areas of shadow, and also to assist differentiation between planes. Typically, the use of shading appears in later childhood. In this drawing, the complex form of the dead man’s face can be seen from an extreme lowangle view, looking from below his chin, up his nostrils. The projective geometry of this drawing is used to not only show three-dimensional volumes, but to situate the viewer psychologically, as well as physically, to the scene. Like other artists (for example, Mantegna), the choice of low-angle viewpoint of a human figure now is made on the basis of expressive, emotional effect.

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

137

Such drawings are interspersed with more light-hearted depictions of spacecraft. In other drawings, he depicts very rational, symmetrical objects and all the parts of these are now beginning to cohere to a near linear perspective system. Does he visualize these images completely in his brain and then somehow ‘copy’ directly from such internal images? The process is probably not like this. The whole issue of internal, mental pictures, and what these are, and how they are composed, is a difficult one. One may think that one has a clear, interiorized mental picture. However, when one tries to analyse it, part by part, it usually turns out to be very vague (van Sommers, 1995). Like most of us, Ben probably does not have, in his brain, a perfectly clear visual representation of these objects, only a rough, approximate sketch. But by drawing one facet in accordance to this approximate interiorized image, he sets up the passage of axes back through the picture plane and it is upon this imaginary scaffolding which the other components are rested. Watching his process of drawing suggests that he, like other fluent draughtspersons, can now coordinate, and hold in his mind, a family of depth-specifying devices which we have seen him gradually assemble since infancy. This means that he can simultaneously hold in his mind, occlusion, hidden line elimination, and the placement of oblique orthogonals together with an approximate image of the affine transformations of the shapes. He can now add tonal effects to this linear framework. In earlier phases, children sometimes start to apply one device independently—say, mapping oblique orthogonals along an imagined axis—but are dismayed at the resulting distortion of shape. In Ben’s case, whilst he maps the oblique directions of a form, he simultaneously draws with reference to an image in his mind of the overall shape and its relationship to other future shapes. This ability to imagine and plan his drawings according to an interiorized set of programmes has been made possible, not only by increases in memory power, but by an exploration of these devices as separate entities and by free practice in their coordination. The experiments which lead up to these projective descriptions are stress-free situations in which there is no fear of failure. In some of the drawings he allows all manner of bizarre and curious distortions. Children are unlikely to make these discoveries solely by overt, instructional ‘lessons’ in which what could and should be engrossing transformational issues are turned to mere ‘problem-solving’ exercises with imposed task demands with attendant ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ solutions. In fact many of Ben’s drawings, which show three-dimensional solids in a three-dimensional looking space, are not always in true perspective, but bring together planes in such a way that they capture the necessary invariants to convince us of their solidity. Many people assume that the ‘correct’ solution for a convincing representation of a three-dimensional space is linear perspective, yet it turns out that many famous pictures which we take to be in perspective are not actually so. Alan Costall (1993, 1995) has described how the human visual system has a great deal of tolerance for projections which diverge from linear perspective. We will return to this point shortly, for it is an important one. This, and other factors challenge the notion that the assumed basis of vision is some sort of linear perspective picture. That Ben can hold in his mind to a certain extent both directional axes and affine transformations of shape is supported by his drawing of objects which do not have regular, ‘carpentered’ surfaces, but are smooth, undulating and curving—like people. In the representation of carpentered forms, the directional axes back through the picture plane are clearly defined. But Ben can also also project the complicated surfaces of the human figure back through the picture plane, suggesting, again, that he can organize these curved surfaces according to an interiorized coordinate frame, and hang the curving, undulating lines upon an invisible framework, whilst at the same time holding in mind a rough picture of the transformations the shapes must pass through. Other objects, like mountains and clouds, allow more freedom but it is not always so easy to say with confidence which drawing system these are constructed in—a point not often mentioned when projective systems are discussed. Alan Costall (1993) has noted this limitation of the projective systems approach to the analysis of pictures. It means that pictures hang together not because of the coherence of underlying projective systems—because frequently there is no coherent system—but because approximations to systems are combined in ingenious ways to make ‘credible’ views (Duthie, 1985).

138

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 107

In addition to being in possession of these abilities of showing a credible three-dimensional space, Ben has not lost the dynamism of this drawing. Sometimes children do lose this vitality temporarily as they try to master new skills. Or else it is lost permanently when parents and teachers push children through Euclidean, then projective geometry. Much understanding of the articulation of form and shape through space has been accomplished by the threedimensional art Ben makes, which now includes complex cardboard sculpture, with regular-sided solids and other forms which are passed through complex curves. The building and manipulation of these sculptures—spacecraft, machines, and human figures—help him visualize and represent articulations of form through space on the flat surface of the paper. These abilities are shown off in the drawing of the ‘Walking Machine’, produced at 9 years 2 months (Figure 104). In Ben’s drawing of 9 years 4 months (Figure 107), Santa Claus returns, but this time in a modernized rocket sleigh, complete with transparent windshield. He looks too jaded to be bothered climbing down chimneys anymore and so Rudolph (recognizable by his red nose) drops toys down the chimney for him. Meanwhile, Santa’s Little Helpers hang on like grim death to the perilously swinging rope ladder. Humour is shown in the imagery, in many ways, in the shape configurations; for example, a sour-faced Santa, with his rotund belly which echoes the roundness of the sack of toys, and in the reindeer, now parked inside the sled. There is subtle humour, too, in the rather pointed use of icons, like Rudoph’s exaggeratedly red nose, and its ‘glow’ marks; and, last but not least, in the representation of movement—the depiction of the swaying rope ladder and the Little Helpers hanging on so perilously. Incidentally, the ‘glow’ marks of Rudolph’s nose, may not be wholly arbitrary conventions, but possibly derive from early understandings and representations of movement, in this case, the movement of light. In drawings like this, we see that Ben is in control of genre. This is typical of children in later childhood. They can vary drawing style in accordance with the demands of the genre. This happens in language use, too. In later childhood there will be a growing sensitivity to the different ‘voices’ required by particular language tasks; a chatty letter will be different from a scientific description, which will be different from an essay about an imaginative adventure. Similarly, in the visual arts, children will vary their approach if they are drawing a map, a still-life study, a scientific diagram, or, as in these cases, a cartoon. Hence, we see that development is not a linear path toward the depiction of threedimensional solids, but that many different styles and approaches may proliferate from infancy (Wolf and Perry, 1988). In terms of the representation of space, Ben has now reached the position in which objects are conceived of as extensions of an overall space represented by the entire drawing surface. By 12 years of age, he is making very beautifully, lightly drawn studies of shells at school, whilst at home he draws fantastic scenes as in Figure 108, as well as maps and plans of Tolkienesque worlds. These relate to the universes he constructs in fantasy role playing games; games which will figure in later development, and to which I will return. With my help, he has also learned to combine colour with tonal gradation. An example of this is the unfinished picture in Figure 108. Many children in adolescence have difficulty in the integration of hue and tone, sometimes confusing these—using tone as if to colour, and hue as if to shade. Children may need some help in differentiating and integrating these two continua. I help Ben, by introducing

POINT OF VIEW: VISUAL REPRESENTATION IN LATER CHILDHOOD

139

Figure 108

him to a traditional way of laying in thin washes of tone, and gradually combining colour with this, in accordance with the tonal continuum, leaving the very darkest and very lightest parts till last, Conclusion In this chapter we have seen that there comes a time when the children try to specify more information about possible views of objects and scenes without sacrificing their understandings of the structure of objects. I have suggested that when children try to encode more information about the structure of objects and events, they sometimes arrive at a possible axis back through the picture plane. Other depth effects may result from action representation, when children extend their understanding of the representation of events and try to map an object’s movement in relation to their own selves, mapping a direction to and from their own imagined position. Although we see depth relations mapped into many children’s drawings, only a few drawings really seem to suggest the idea of a view from observation of nature. It may be that in many kinds of drawing made by children we are looking at different ways in which invariant or non-accidental properties of the object, scene or event, are organized with respect to the drawing surface. Some of these drawings show possible views. These views are not always like the ones we obtain from gazing at the world from a fixed position, but may comprise views from imagination and dreams, or else are hypothetical and sectional views. One projective system, which captures view-specific information, is linear perspective. It is not ‘better’ in an absolute sense than any of the other approaches used by children, but like all the other approaches it offers its own limitations and possibilities. Linear perspective freezes scenes and objects into an allusion to a credible threedimensional space, as if seen from a fixed station-point. It also specifies the viewer’s relationship to a scene. Such views of scenes are constructed from the conception of the picture surface as a window opening onto a physical environment. This paradigm derives from the Renaissance and continues to dominate some kinds of image making, even electronic imagery. Consider science fiction films or computer imagery where spacecraft zoom through a three-dimensional environment which continuously unwraps onto this new glass window. The imagery of lens media, electronic media and the hologram are all based on discoveries made in fifteenth-century Florence. I would argue that the main thrust of children’s development in visual representation is spontaneous, neither deriving from, nor dependent upon, imitation of projective models. How children make use of the projective systems of the imagery around them and incorporate them into their developmental programmes is not at all straightforward. It is not a direct copy of cultural exemplars and development will never be understood if one assumes that it is a simple method

140

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

of imitation. As we have seen, the influences upon the child are constrained by the direction and momentum of attractor systems which sweep through and guide the child’s interaction with visual media and the environment at large. Development is not best understood as a single, linear progression toward ‘visually realistic’ pictures. Although Ben is one of those children who does move toward the depiction of depth and increasingly toward a linear perspective model, he becomes acquainted with, and uses, many other approaches to representation and expression too. As we have seen, drawing itself is part of an entire programme of ways of expressing and describing reality. These expressive and representational modes flower from the same source into a multitude of directions, offering all sorts of possibilities and ways of encoding reality. For example, Hannah is now a very good painter and draughtsperson, but she is also an accomplished musician, singer and dancer. In retrospect, I can see these musical and dance forms emerging in her early modes of representation and expression in infancy: in her sensitivity to rhythmic periodicities; in her dance-like event structures; and in the synchrony between her body actions, vocalizations, and her unfolding images, patterns and colours. Joel also draws and paints well, and he is also a musician. Of great delight and surprise to me is that he is studying early childhood education and development at university, with a special interest in the art of the young child. This was unexpected but, again in retrospect, the skills of analysis of childhood development were (of course) implicit in the area of discourse formed between Joel as an infant and his parents. Perhaps he has been sensitized to these skills by studying me studying him. From similar starting points, the results can be surprising and unexpected. Development seems to be an elaboration of structural rules and principles which may, at a deep level of description, be generalizable to many children’s development. These structural rules are the outcome of attractor systems which are unfolding in relation to the child’s interaction with visual media and the environment. The term ‘environment’, as used here, includes the interpersonal environment. Development is spontaneously driven, and even the basic steps toward perspectival depiction in the visual representation seem to be a natural consequence of a sequence in which structural principles are deployed. However, for development in representation and expression to fully flourish, support of a special kind is needed from an informed adult companion. Although Ben is unusually motivated to draw, his development is assisted though discussion with Linda and me about how the expressive and spatial effects in his drawing come about, plus analysis of other peoples’ pictures, and photographs. This helps him understand the integration of several systems and approaches to visual representation and how to more consciously articulate them.

Chapter 10 The View from Room 26: Drawings of Adolescence

The issue for the infant has been to work out the transformational and denotational values of lines and shapes. In later childhood and adolescence, structural and design principles continue to be worked out, but these are coordinated as structures that have levels of meaning beyond formal descriptions of surface layout. The older child and adolescent may start to use the visual structure as a vehicle to investigate what are essentially psychological and philosophical issues; questions about personal identity, and questions about reality and its representation. The older person becomes more sensitive to metaphor, to ‘behind-the-scenes’ symbolism (Wolf, 1989). The teenager realizes that the full meaning of a work may not be obtainable from a description of the surface or formal layout of an artwork. This is an important shift in the development of metacognition. Art offers new possibilities as a metarepresentational vehicle, a means of thinking about thinking. Art is used to reflect on art. Additionally, whereas the younger child had established certain structural rules and, for a period of time, perhaps adhered to these fixedly, the older child and teenager realizes the value of stretching or even breaking the rules. This parallels the radical revolution occurring in personal identity between about 14 years to 17 years. Accompanying traumatic changes to the body are equally radical changes to the mind and to the perception and understanding of the world. These changes are reflected in the changes in the art of older children and adolescents. In terms of its visual expression, this upheaval is analogued by a disruption of absolute realities. For some teenagers, what is real, and what is not, becomes an important, if not central, issue. The View from Room 26 The young artist may use art fairly consciously to meditate upon ultimate realities of life and death. Ben’s drawings and paintings about recovering from a near fatal brain tumour at 15 years of age are an especially poignant example. This is an extreme example of the search and struggle to invent a new self out of the ashes of the old. In this work, much of the four-dimensional language of earlier childhood has been subsumed; incorporated to form a pictorial world in which space, time, depth are coordinated. These pictures utilize new projective systems, including oblique projection and linear perspective. Ben’s acquisition of these systems has been described above. However, such pictures, like many perspectival pictures, are as much to do with showing a moment in the temporal flow as they are with showing a fragment of the ‘frozen’ optical array (Gibson, 1979; Costall, 1993). In Ben’s case, this depiction of volumetric solids within a clearly articulated Cartesian coordinate frame had been partially accomplished just prior to his illness. By 14 years of age Ben is drawing from the nude life model at Camberwell Art School, in London. These are sophisticated drawings that represent the human figure through a clearly articulated space, from a variety of stationpoints. However, the development of skills in rendering a measurable, rational, three-dimensional space on the two dimensional surface, is only part of the story. His life drawings are interspersed with Tolkienesque drawings and paintings; forbidding forests, mysterious castles, dungeons, ferocious-looking soldiers and the maps of strange terrain and labyrinths.

Figure 109

142

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

After the temporary sabotage wrought by his brain tumour, Ben’s reconstruction of his world is represented in drawing and painting. These art forms not only reflect this process of rebuilding, but also play an important part in the resurrection. One job he takes up again, and completes, is the projection of three-dimensional space onto the twodimensional surface. However, this is really only part of a larger and more complex agenda. In common with much adolescent art, the depiction of convincing three-dimensional space is the surface layer of multiple levels of meaning. Underneath this surface layer, Ben finally realizes the possibilities of metaphor, which were dawning in the art of infancy. As he recovers, and as a means of reorganizing his physical and mental being, Ben learns new skills too. These are dancing, theatre and circus skills, including monocycling and juggling with fire. These circus skills also reflect a concern for the position, identity and control of objects as they move through three dimensions of space plus the dimension of time. Ascent from the Labyrinth The painting in Figure 109 is one of the first works Ben produces as he recovers from the illness that nearly killed him. It is in acrylic paints and is a subjective view, as if from Ben’s station-point, of a nurse’s face looming over and towards him, shining a pencil torch into his eyes. The painting is called ‘Midnight Obs’. It is rendered in broad, bravura strokes. The meticulous detail of his pre-illness paintings has gone. The background is dark purple. A golden white light blazes out at the viewer from a pencil torch in the nurse’s hand, illuminating her cap and half the bone structure of her face. The subject matter of the picture is about an aspect of the treatment for intracranial tumours. Throughout Ben’s therapy, the doctors have been checking for a sign that the pressure on the cranial nerves, which help control lateral and longitudinal movements of the eyes, which give the retina its focusing power, and its ability to accommodate to changes in light intensity, has been relieved. Signs that this pressure is decreasing are gauged by the responsiveness of the pupils to changes in light; hence the pencil torch observation. ‘It’s something I remembered right from the beginning/ Ben says to me. ‘I would be asleep and be woken up to see this face bending over me, lit up on the blackness, and a bright light shining into my eyes. Sometimes I would see rainbow colours.’ In the painting, there is heralded the psychological ambiguity that is present in the spate of drawings and paintings which follow. Even the intrinsic benevolence of the night nurse’s routine observation is brought into question. Her expression is obscured in the darkness. Her motivations and intentions are ambivalent. The source of the light—a spectral beacon hovering in the night—can only be guessed. The true meaning of this portent of the night remains uncertain. Later, there are more pictures, in which he regains control of the pencil. These new pictures are complex, detailed and multi-layered in meaning. It is as if, by struggling to produce these pictures, he is carefully reconstructing his world. Gradually, this world is complete in most details with everything fully coordinated into an overall spatial and temporal scheme. Only a few details seem persistently to elude him; for example, people’s hands are drawn very small, with stump-like fingers. Many of these drawings are melodramatic, which is typical of many teenagers’ work. Having discovered that art may be consciously manipulated as metaphor, then these meanings are often heavily underlined. Curiously, in Ben’s drawings, this emphasis, rather than weakening the impact, rather increases the shock of their meaning. It is almost as if ‘adolescent art’ as a genre, is being self-consciously used as an expressive vehicle. One pen and ink drawing (Figure 110), entitled, ‘Conquering Heroes’ shows a group of forlorn warriors, bedraggled, ragged, some wounded, crouched on a beach at the edge of a great, flat, calm sea. They huddle around a small campfire, and one feeds the flames with sticks that have been drawn to resemble bones. With haggard face and widened eyes, another stares out of the picture, not directly at the viewer, but slightly downward, as if at visions only he can see. The direction of eye gaze has itself been used to create axes through the picture, which assist in its psychological drama. In the distance, atop a pinnacle of ruined buildings, a weary soldier sits, hunched over the tattered flag he struggles to hold aloft. To the left is another torn flag, stirring fitfully in the murmur of a breeze. Speared through on top of the thin

THE VIEW FROM ROOM 26: DRAWINGS OF ADOLESCENCE

143

Figure 110

flagstaff, is a decapitated human head, a self portrait of Ben, his final stare and final scream transfixed in immolation. This head, viewed together with the other objects to which it is attached, the pole on which it is set, and the tattered sackcloth flag, with the scythe sticking out, resembles a scarecrow figure. The screaming mouth appears to be making a final command to unseeing, unheeding troops. But of course, this is an illusion. The figure is dead, the wind alone, rustling the hessian body, breathes into it a simulated life. In an otherwise empty sky, a flock of black birds fly. An inscription on a block of stone reads: ‘You shall find peace at last.’ Decapitation A decapitated head stares out at us in many of his drawings of this period. This is nearly always Ben’s head. In Figure 111, for example, it is Ben’s gruesome head, again fixed on a spike, which dominates the picture. It is on a shelf of books, as if as a memento, a mere bookend, propping up a set of mouldering tomes. The image of the decapitated head, often depicted with a blade running through its centre, refers to his brain tumour. In this drawing, Ben has placed another interesting element. This is the mathematical puzzle called ‘The Rubic Cube’. Ben may be saying something about the brain and its potential; or possibly about his struggle to make sense of a complex puzzle. In close juxtaposition to the decapitated head, it reminds us that in addition to the terrible possibilities of loss of mobility and physical skills, there are other horrors; loss of intelligence, even reduction to vegetable matter. Next to the image of the decapitated head is another image which also appears in pictures of this time, that of a hole broken though a wall, or archway, the edges broken and showing raw rubble. This shape appears in drawings that depict dungeons or crumbling subterranean worlds. In some drawings I believe this represents his skull, either being burst from within by the tumour, or penetrated from without by the deep x-rays, or by the surgery performed on his head.

144

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 111

The broken archway appears in Figure 112. This is a bleak cartoon, a Christmas card to the staff of the Radiography Department. ‘Ye Olde Cure For Brain Tumas,’ claims the legend on the battered wooden sign above the victim whose bald and bruised head (recognizably Ben’s portrait) has burst through the arch of the stone bridge and is about to be struck a blow by a hammer. In the background, a queue of people watch. Ben’s ability and willingness to turn this horror into a joke is a sign of recovery. We laugh at even the horrific from a distance. Humour is a sign of intellectual understanding in adolescence as it was in earlier childhood. Fallen Gods Images of violence appear in many of his drawings at this time, executed in a different style from that of his cartoons. These sometimes involve dwarves, dragons, knights, superheroes, some of which derive from his readings of Tolkien, and Tolkienesque fantasy role-playing games. These games are interactive games in which complex, imaginary universes are constructed. The geography, politics, flora and fauna of these worlds, as well as the psychology of imaginary beings and monsters who inhabit them, are constructed from arithmetical algorithms based on the rolling of multi-faceted dice in conjunction with reference to complicated books of rules. Sometimes, the playing of the games is supported by miniature items of scenery, for example, castles or rock outcrops; and figures, usually cast in lead and sometimes well sculpted. Each imaginary character has his or her own personality traits, physical and psychological; strengths and weaknesses that are translated into numerical values in the rule book. The moves each character is allowed to make are partly determined by the score from a roll of the dice. However, reference to the rule book, in which are listed the personality traits, talents, personal abilities of each character, modifies the score on the dice, either putting constraints upon the moves the character is allowed to make, or else allowing additional benefits. This means that the game mimics real life in the sense that the given psychological and physical endowment of the characters interacts with random and unpredictable forces. The object of the game may be to find one’s way through a labyrinth, or across a mysterious landscape, or to recover treasure or some kind of magical object, like a Holy Grail. This universe is not wholly deterministic. The success of the player depends to some extent on his or her skill in identifying with the imaginary agent and anticipating what may be in wait ahead, around the next turn in the labyrinth, or bend in the trail though the dark forest. In this way, the player tries to make best use of the powers of the character. The permutations are enormous. Games may take days to prepare —in working out their physical, political and psychological nature—and sometimes weeks to complete. The use of props—the lead figures—only assist a game, which is largely sustained by imagination alone. These games provide the link between the symbolic play of early childhood and the interiorized imagination of adulthood.

THE VIEW FROM ROOM 26: DRAWINGS OF ADOLESCENCE

Figure 112

145

146

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

The iconography of superheroes and heroines and their adventures is in keeping with the style and content of many adolescent children’s drawings. As parents prove fallible, and friends from one’s own peer group also let one down, or with whom one finds oneself in competition, so young people turn to other protectors and friends. These ‘Fantasy Guardian Angels’ (Partington and Grant, 1984, p. 88) may be pop stars like Madonna, or Michael Jackson, or even great thinkers or leaders. This was presaged with the superheroes of infancy and later childhood. They might change a little with time, from Captain Marvel to Buzz Lightyear, but they symbolize the same command of physical or mental prowess and protective force. The Spice Girls, for example, are the teenager’s equivalent of the Teletubbies. Some superheroes and heroines are arbiters of justice, solvers of problems, movers of mountains. Some can often fly, or at least have some means to move powerfully, gracefully, brilliantly. This is as true of Madonna as it is of Superman. These figures really form a later part of a continuum that started in infancy, when a paint brush or hand-held toy was set in motion, and the child became the initiator and controller of powerful forces. It is upon those hypothetical realities that these new levels of representation are constructed. Like other teenagers, Ben uses these images as signifiers of further levels of meaning. It is in the nature of adolescent art that further levels of meaning are realized and consciously articulated. There is nothing unusual in Ben’s drawings in this respect. One difference in Ben’s use of these images relates to the content; which is his reflection upon his illness. Another difference between his drawings and those of many other teenagers is one of degree, rather than kind. This is the formal structure of the pictures. Ben articulates these forms in a very sophisticated way, linking shapes not only together along the surface, but also along a psychological dimension. To surface shape he links multiple chains of psychological meaning and association. In his choice of images and the way these images interlock with each other and with the surface description, he has extended the ‘analogue space’ (Wolf, 1983) constructed in childhood. Although both formal and psychological aspects are perhaps more fully developed in Ben’s work than that of many teenagers, this is at least partly due to the teaching environment in which he has grown up. Many teenagers begin to realize the metaphoric nature of art and how this might be encoded in visual descriptions of shape and form. In general, the teenager starts to realize how an image represents feelings and ideas beyond a mere description of surface layout. Long ago, the child discovers that the physical space of the drawing surface can allude to other spaces not occupied by the picture as a physical artefact As a young child, Ben struggled to sort out the denotational values of the line on the page (Willats, 1985), what the line actually stood for, in terms of edges or boundaries of objects and surfaces in an hypothesized physical world. As an adolescent he realizes that there are further possible uses in the way these structures can interlock with text and context, and make allusions to psychological rather than physical entities. The adolescent becomes aware of the power of ‘behind the scenes’ symbolization (Wolf, 1989). The teenager starts to realize how the structure and the content of the picture can stand for, in a wider and deeper sense, entities for which there are no fixed or easy descriptions; ideas and feelings which can only be alluded to. When I write that it is the older child who becomes more in command of deeper levels of symbolism, this is not to say that younger children do not use or understand metaphor in any sense. They do. We have seen many earlier instances in Ben’s art, even at age 3 years, in which he makes multiple plays on ideas and their categories; linguistic and visual. (See, for example, Figure 48, ‘Six Boys with Flags’, p. 82.) There are also other examples, which I mentioned earlier, in Chapter 8 (see p. 108), of Hannah’s drawings, made at 5 years 2 months, at the time when her brother is ill. Using controlled angular variation she makes a series of drawings about a huge dial, with its spinning pointer, which she has seen on a television programme. In the programme, the pointer on the dial is spun to select a contestant. This contestant is then trained in a difficult or unusual skill, like tightrope walking, or lion taming, and will eventually appear on television demonstrating this skill to the amusement of thousands, including friends and relatives. One man is selected to learn ‘Bungey jumping’ —jumping and spectacularly bouncing up and down from an elastic rope from a large height. Tragically, in a freak accident, this man dies during rehearsals before the show. Perhaps especially because this happens at the time when her brother is so ill, this impresses

THE VIEW FROM ROOM 26: DRAWINGS OF ADOLESCENCE

147

Hannah powerfully. Hannah’s drawings (Figures 70 and 73) are about this wheel of destiny. In the final drawing of the series (Figure 73), she bisects small nuclei with lines that crisscross the drawing surface at many different angles. As she draws this, she says,‘…and something very frightening happened…’. From overhearing our conversations about her brother’s illness, and possible cure, she has produced a drawing which represents x-rays bombarding his tumour. This is a powerful example of the multiple levels of even very young children’s visual descriptions. In this case, at formal level, Hannah masters obliquity and angular variation. At deeper levels of meaning, this play with graphic structures serves as a way, perhaps, of coming to terms with a life-threatening situation. Representational play also can perform this function, holding a frightful reality at arm’s length, literally and metaphorically, in order that it can be considered. The main difference between the multiple layering of meaning in the art of young children and that of teenagers, is the degree of conscious realization and control. If a young child draws a house on fire, it may well unconsciously symbolize a crisis in the child’s life, a family torn apart perhaps by strife. But the young child will not tell you this. He or she will just say that it is a ‘house on fire’. The adolescent, on the other hand, sometimes knows, and sometimes knows self-consciously, that the images can be used to stand in the place of other events and ideas or feelings. Nonetheless, it is upon the work of infancy that the teenager has built his or her art. The adolescent builds upon the knowledge obtained through years of ‘infrastructural investigation’ (Bickerton, 1981, p. 234) performed through infancy, of the elements and conditions of art praxis. However, the young child’s knowledge is generally at an unconscious level. The infant’s project is to establish a relationship between the lines and shapes on the page and the objects and events in the external world. The older child is of course still engaged in this task, but additionally is trying to bring to consciousness the laws through which lines and shapes specify spatial and temporal relationships. One of the reasons for so trying to gain control of these rules is because of a new project, which combines (albeit unconsciously) the dynamism and urgency of drawings of infancy, but unites them at a more conscious level—in fact, a self-conscious level. Secret Chambers Another drawing shows a man, possibly a manservant, or perhaps a Master of Ceremonies, standing in front of a doorway that opens onto a perfectly white void (Figure 113). He smiles toward us and, with a diminished, stump-like hand, seems either to beckon us to follow, or perhaps indicate something he wants us to see, just out of sight, beyond the edges of the picture. It is hard to gauge the disposition of this phantasmal figure, which, like that of the night nurse, remains ambiguous. He looks masterful and confident, but is his smile mocking? Nor is he fully in control. He does not know everything that is happening. Behind him, from outside the door, a bony, skeletal hand reaches in and is about to seize him by the shoulder. Again, Ben plays with line-of-sight. In this example, as in several others, the direction of eyegaze creates a directional axis that is vital to the drawing’s meaning. The viewer can see something the man cannot see, but we are unable to tell him. At the bottom right of the picture, another allusion is made. The tail of a dragon can be seen curling around the near door frame. The undulating forms of the dragon tail echoes that of the man’s coat-tail, which flaps in a fierce wind at the doorway. Perhaps Ben intends this dragon ‘tail’ to be a visual and linguistic pun on the coat—‘tail’. Nothing is quite what it seems. Several drawings of this time similarly offer us no assurance about the status of key figures in the scene. Tension is created about where, if anywhere, power resides. Who is in charge? Who is in control? Who knows the answers? These pictures give us no easy answers and little comfort. In some pictures, a seemingly powerful figure is made vulnerable. Characters who, at first sight, seem to have some authority are themselves unaware of events happening, ‘behind their backs’. The way the spatial relation ‘behind’ is used by an adolescent, as compared with its use by a younger child, is an instance of surface structure being coordinated to make not only a physical space but a psychological space. Whereas the younger child struggled to represent physical before-and-behind relations, the older

148

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 113

child uses this and the other prepositional axes to allude to further levels of meaning, not always visual. Ideas about what things look like from other points of view, now have several levels of meaning. This is one of the reasons why the ability to stipulate the viewer’s relationship to the scene is very important. Viewpoint is not merely a way of showing depth relationships, and the three-dimensionality of objects and scenes. There is the possibility emerging in some adolescent art of moving around freely within a represented three-dimensional space, and so controlling how the viewer positions him/herself both physically and psychologically in relation to the scene. The beginning of this understanding was formed in infancy, in representational play with hand-held toy figures, when the child organized the physical lines of sight of these imaginary agents within imaginary worlds. The interactions of these imaginary people was influenced by the child’s conceptualization of their states of mind. Hence, even young children represent states of minds, and states of affairs, as well as states of things. The older child and adolescent builds upon those earlier understandings, becoming aware of the complex interplay of meanings and possibilities which the organization of lines-of-sight offers. The spatial axes specified by lines-of-sight simultaneously specify psychological states of the actors within the scene. Additionally, controlling the viewer’s position affects the viewer’s psychological orientation to the picture. Some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance realized this. For example, Mantegna’s selection of unusual station-points causes powerful psychological effects in the viewer. One drawing by 15 year old Ben bears a legend at the top which reads: ‘The Old Order Changeth, Yielding Place To New’. This is a preparatory pencil drawing for a painting called ‘Absorption’ (Figure 117) which I will describe shortly (see p. 153). In the drawing under discussion, Ben depicts himself looking out of the picture, not quite at the viewer. On the table before him, Ben has depicted another drawing—a drawing within a drawing—from which small,

THE VIEW FROM ROOM 26: DRAWINGS OF ADOLESCENCE

149

Figure 114

armoured figures rise up, fighting each other, in apparent three dimensions from the drawing surface. This is a device we see a great deal in his pictures at this time. Behind him, unnoticed by Ben, but perhaps sensed, a skeleton looms, like the Figure of Death. This was actually derived from a cardboard skeleton (by my friend, designer Rick Millar), which hung on its stand in the corner of the room behind him, when Ben painted and drew at his table. Again, this is the use of vantage points to express the idea that certain viewers can see only certain things. Stumbling Heroes Rules of balance and imbalance are likewise exploited to convey impending states of physical and psychological instability. Ben produces a series of drawings of ‘Stumbling Heroes’ (Figures 114, 115). The people in these drawings and paintings are imperfect. They are men who have lost their way, or men wounded yet still standing. Some of these drawings show a lone, male figure in desperate trouble. Again, it is a figure who would ordinarily appear powerful, but whose power has been lost; like a fallen god. This hero has many guises: a Private Eye, losing his footing, stumbling, trying desperately to reach his fallen gun; a soldier wobbling on his feet, poorly positioned to fend off a blow from an unseen assailant; a knight about to topple from his horse before a scaly dragon. These heroes are often precariously balanced; we are not sure whether they will fall, or regain their footing. The situation could go either way—it is ‘in the balance’. Ben usually provides the hero with a weapon, but the weapon is invariably falling from his hands, or else it is broken—the splintered shaft of a spear; the useless hilt of a sword (Figure 115). ‘Rise and Fall’ is like this (Figure 116). Here, a figure moves through three dimensions of space, revealing Ben’s complete mastery of the representation of volumetric solids as seen from any station-point in a completed Cartesian coordinate system. The figure at the top of the picture is losing his sword as he falls backward, to topple, turning,

150

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 115

Figure 116

THE VIEW FROM ROOM 26: DRAWINGS OF ADOLESCENCE

151

upside-down, and then nearly, but not quite, returning to an upright position, at which point the cycle starts all over again. Is this a circle of death and rebirth, or an unbroken wheel of suffering? An interest in predicting and controlling the movement of solids through three dimensions of space perhaps provides the basis for some of his later interests. From 16 years into adult life, Ben learns juggling and other circus skills, and becomes a successful performance artist in Singapore. These skills of moving brightly coloured balls or fiery clubs, in three dimensions, are transformations of concerns which occurred in infancy; concerns about the shape, location, and movements of objects in space and time; a concern with identity and destiny. The Construction of the Viewer Another picture is a painting entitled ‘Absorption’ (Figure 117). It is self-portrait of the artist, Ben, completely absorbed in thought. The multiple meaning of the title itself is one which would only make complete sense to the older child. A young child, having understood the concept of absorption at a literal and physical level, may still, for a while, have difficulties with further levels of interpretation. It will be some time before the child can appreciate that absorption can refer to a mental state. This ties up with the child’s gradual understanding of mental states; his or her own, and those of other people. As we have seen, such understandings are worked out in the alternative universes, constructed in symbolic play. In these little worlds, the player has considered how imagined actors cope, both physically and emotionally, as they try to find their ways out of difficult or near impossible situations. ‘Absorption’ is a painting produced whilst he is recovering from his brain tumour. Influenced by the imagery of both Tolkien and Escher, it is nonetheless a work that is uniquely Ben’s. It is his self-portrait as he sits in front of a halffinished painting—a painting within a painting. Ben’s face is rapt, concentrating as if on some impossible problem, as if working out some insoluble koan. His hair has started to grow back after radiotherapy, but is still short. His brow is furrowed, his face prematurely old. He stares out of his own picture apparently unaware of extraordinary activities beneath him. Below him, in the painting within the painting, pictures of monsters are starting to come to life, crawling out of their two-dimensional universe, into the three-dimensional world of their creator. Ben is playing with the paradox that the ‘third dimension’ which these creatures enter is only the two-dimensional allusion to the threedimensional world of the picture. Perhaps Ben has summoned the creatures into being. In earlier versions, a pair of dice rests on the table. The portrait is of Ben in his role as Games Master in a fantasy roleplaying game. For about a year before he became so ill, he and his friends played these games, in which destiny is determined, partially at least, by the tumbling dice… In the finished work, on the table by the side of the painting within in the painting are large books, tomes which perhaps hold the rules and secrets of this conjured world. Although the drawing of the books is completely credible three-dimensional projection, they are not in fact drawn in linear perspective. They are drawn in oblique projection, the orthogonals of the books remaining parallel, rather than converging to a vanishing point at optical infinity. This is another example of the wide tolerance people have for pictures other than that of linear perspective, but which nevertheless convey possible views of objects (Costall, 1993). The large books form plateaux and gullies in which is assembled a dissolute and ragged army, similar to the soldiers in ‘Conquering Heroes’ (Figure 110). These figures are drawn from very detailed lead miniatures, sold as accessories to the fantasy roleplaying games. Two characters rest against the side of a book. One rests his arms behind his head, against the closed pages, as if these are strata of ancient rocks, the messages of time written into them perhaps. These figures have been painted in incredible detail, as if Ben perhaps firmly re-establishes his own mastery, bringing together those skills shattered by the monster in his brain.

152

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Figure 117

THE VIEW FROM ROOM 26: DRAWINGS OF ADOLESCENCE

153

Conclusion In this chapter I have focused on part of the longitudinal study of Ben. Although in some ways he is atypical, his artwork exhibits characteristics shared by the work of other teenagers. Whereas in infancy and childhood, the child worked out the denotational values of lines—what the lines and shapes stood for in the physical world—the older child and adolescent articulates further levels of meaning and metaphor. Ben’s drawing and painting are examples of this general process. Thus, in some of these pictures, Ben depicts life as a game of chance in which even God must take his chances.

Chapter 11 Representation and Human Freedom

I have argued that a family of expressive and representational modes generated in infancy interact together to form internal descriptions of reality and the basis of representational thought. The actions children perform upon visual media may seem random and unpredictable, until one views these as dynamic systems. These dynamic systems guide the child’s search of the environment for certain forms and relationships. Part of the problem in identifying the meaning of this art of children has been one of definitions. The unquestioned assumption that the development of visual representation is a form of progress from chaotic, meaningless beginnings to pictures of recognizably three-dimensional objects in an unambiguously articulated space, has concealed the uses to which young children put visual media. Ironically, this assumption has also masked the process through which some children do map depth relations onto the drawing surface. Development in representation may be driven by attractor systems which are information-seeking structures which function like guides for children’s actions, and structure the way they use and organize visual media. The actions which children perform upon various media form a unitary—but not homogenous—family of representational and expressive modes which have spatial, kinaesthetic, logico-mathematical, linguistic, musical, dance-like aspects, as well as image making. The child forms two important approaches to representation which are configurative and dynamic modes. These modes sweep through all aspects of representation like ‘waves’ through different streams of intelligence (Wolf, 1984; Gardner, 1985). Configurative modes of action capture the shape and structure of objects; dynamic modes of representation record or monitor the movement of events or objects, seen or imagined. Some action representations are not straightforward records of the trajectories of objects, but are more subtle messages—internal dialogues made within the process itself about the process itself. The meanings of these performances are not always easy to express in words. Nonetheless they are elegant orchestrations of image, dance and song, in which actions of the body, involving the movements of the skeletal frame, the musculature, facial expression, speech, and the act of seeing, interact with the transformational effects of media processes. It is in such action programmes that the child discerns and exploits characteristics which are aesthetic and expressive. It is possible that the structure of object representations in fact derive from the event scripts inherent in action representation. It may be that when children make action representations they do not initially realize that movement is the result of forces, but see it as another kind of change. It may be that in action representation they sort out ideas about movements and realize that resultant shapes are the consequence of an interplay of forces. Some of the early drawings are topological in the sense that topology shows the shape, not only of the contours of objects, but also the shape of dynamical systems (Gleick, 1987). Later representations of objects and scenes may not result from direct observations and recordings of the visible world but are constructions mapped upon directional axes discovered in earlier infancy. The extent to which children are able to fulfil the early promise of their first visual descriptions, and build upon these to form descriptions of an observable world, may to large extent depend on the kind and quality of child-care and education they receive.

REPRESENTATION AND HUMAN FREEDOM

155

Universality and Cultural Variation I have argued that development is universal. Some writers show samples of children’s artworks which show a similar pattern of development; yet other researchers offer evidence showing differences purported to be the result of cultural variation. A version of the traditional stage theory—that children progress from the tadpole to the conventional figure and finally produce realistic drawings of people and objects—is often used as a baseline against which to measure ‘cultural variation’. This leads to confusion, because the use of this model as a baseline inevitably gives rise to apparently irreconcilable differences between descriptions of children’s art. Of course we will see many variations in human figure drawing from time to time and place to place. The question is what causes the children to select the images they do select. Clearly, they do not select anything or everything from the pictorial environment. That structural principles are universal can easily be misunderstood to mean that children pass through the production of similar artworks, but universality does not mean homogeneity. In fact, the mechanisms which drive development mean that development cannot be homogenous. The structural principles are based upon the limits and possibilities of the human visual systems and the other actions of the body, but they drive processes of representation and expression which are dynamic, nonlinear systems, and which are very sensitive to initial conditions. This means they will give rise to a multiplicity of variations from the same deep structural principles. An example of an interpretation purportedly showing fundamental cultural variation, occurs in a study made by Rosemary Hill (1996), and commented on by Maureen Cox (1997), of the Warlpiri people at Yuendumu, Australia. In one observation, a child makes a travelling zigzag in the sand whilst describing the wanderings of travellers through the desert. The commentator tells us that such journeys through the desert are very important to these children; who are told stories about important journeys in their folktales. The inference is being made that this drawing is quite unlike anything we would see in other cultures (Hill, 1996). First of all, we have seen that the travelling zigzag is a Second Generation Structure discovered by most children. Secondly, an interest in trajectories, passages of movement and unfolding events are common to nearly all children and are represented in their drawings and other forms of representation. Children from all over the world will be told just as many and just as important stories about journeys. Like the Warlpiri children, they will represent these in action representations. Another example, from the same study, is these children’s use of a curved closure, a horse-shoe shaped region for the representation of the human figure. Again, the U-shaped region is an important graphic structure discovered by most children. It is an inevitable outcome of structural variation, when children start to make further specifications about the shape of a closed region. For example, we saw Hannah use it to represent a bridge. The Warlpiri children have used it to represent a human figure, but some children from other places also use it as the basis of the representation of animals or human figures. Used to support the thesis of cultural difference is the finding that the Warlpiri children integrate their traditional modes of drawing with different images they acquire from school. However, given the interaction between the structural principles unfolding in children’s drawing, and what is available within the pictorial environment, we would expect a mixture of styles and images to appear in the art of many cultural groups. Other writers argue that children’s art can only be understood as a reflection of adult ideas within the cultural and artistic zeitgeist of the time. It is certainly true that to understand the nature of children’s drawings and paintings we should be aware of the artistic and intellectual context in which these are produced, and we should be cautious how we use and understand the term ‘art’ in relation to children’s work. However, according to some writers, the qualities we imagine we see in children’s art are only illusions we project into it because of our understandings about adults’ art. Brent Wilson, for example, argues that the ‘expressiveness’ of children’s art is really an adult’s construction derived from modernist ideas of self-expression and abstraction (Wilson, 1997). It is true that even displays of emotions and feelings are shaped to a certain extent by culture. Even the experience and expression of pain, for example, may be influenced by cultural beliefs. How adults construe the child’s displays of emotion is crucial to development. However, few people would want to argue that the expressiveness we see in children’s laughter or tears is only the product of

156

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

adult imaginings. Similarly, although I strongly support the idea that how adults conceptually construe a child’s painting is crucial to development, to say that the expressiveness we see in a child’s painting is only a product of our cultural paradigms about art is grossly misleading. I have opposed the position that children’s acquisition of representational systems is a product of an introduction into arbitrary, conventional semiotic systems. Rather, I have argued that expressive and representational modes are impelled from within the infant. Using ideas derived from Colwyn Trevarthen, I have stressed that children’s interaction with media is organized by patterned bursts of emotion driven from deep within subcortical structures. The infant’s use of visual media is built upon the expressive use of the body in earlier infancy and is a part of the same continuum. The infant quickly learns to detect and exploit the expressive characteristics of his or her body actions and it is upon these expressive actions that the first use of visual media is based. The theory that children’s art is a reflection of adult art sometimes incorporates another false idea; that children only learn to develop imagery by copying adult exemplars. As we have seen, one has to explain why children are attracted to certain structures and not to others, and how they incorporate these into their own structures. Children simply do not copy what is already there, but bring something new to these exemplars. First of all, the selection by the child of one or other image is the result of those searching schemas; and even within a single image this input is subject to the constraints of the attractor systems which sweep through children’s actions performed upon all media. As we have seen, other people’s pictures are, in fact, very important to the development of drawing, but the way these special objects interact with children’s development is complex. Availability of other people’s images does not, in itself, explain development. The child’s interaction with a pictorial environment is just part of the cultural flow between the child and ambient culture. The model of development I have described is one in which an unfolding programme generated from within the child interacts with what is available in the environment according to attractor systems which select and structure input. An excellent example is the success with young children of the British television programme, the Teletubbies. Part of the reason of its popularity is that it contains very clear and powerful examples of the attractors which are likely to be generated by very young children and which form their earliest conceptual concerns (Athey, 1997, personal communication). One sequence, for example, entails the Teletubbies coming around; coming out from inside; going inside from outside; going through; going up; going down; and going from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’, followed by combinations of these patterns of action. These directional axes, spatio-temporal relationships, and their permutations are clearly underlined by spoken commentary on the sound track. I have emphasized that adults’ interaction and provision is crucial for development but of course this is not to say that all environments are good for nurturing intellectual growth. The polarization of educational models into laissez faire education on the one side and transmission models of education on the other, has been politically engineered worldwide to ensure that this issue is obscured. How to Damage Your Child’s Drawing Ability The development of children’s imagery is often sabotaged in the primary and early years by drilling children into prescribed routines to produce kitsch and cutesy images. These cottage industries in which children follow step by step the instructions towards an end result of the most trivial kind, pre-envisaged in the teacher’s mind, effectively damage children’s developing modes of representation (Matthews, 1996a, 1996b). I believe that some programmes of instruction (if one can honour them with this term) amount to nothing less than child abuse (Matthews, 1996b). This is especially so if there is internal conflict in educational programmes between an agenda to promote individual intellectual development, and the completely different aim of controlling people’s behaviour and thinking. For example, in Singapore’s early childhood and primary school education, prescriptive, rote learning involving prematurely imposed techniques in Euclidean geometry disallow the expressive transformation of shape we see in Ben’s and other children’s drawing. Older Singaporean children are trained prematurely in limiting and limited ways of

REPRESENTATION AND HUMAN FREEDOM

157

mapping quasi-three-dimensional layout onto the two-dimensional surface. This is part of a larger educational programme that seeks total control of people’s thought and behaviour. With notable exceptions, the end results are citizens whose aesthetic responses and use of graphic or visual media are miserably impoverished. Perhaps even more seriously, this schooling also seriously undermines people’s capacity to originate and sustain any autonomous, independent thought. This criticism is not the result of western ethnocentric bias on my part. Many local people are concerned about their children’s education. Additionally, the government itself expresses increasing concern that the failure to produce thinking and feeling citizens may have serious effects on Singapore’s abilities to compete in the international scene, where inventiveness, innovation and creativity are more and more realized to be the means of survival. In very few places in the world perhaps is the conflict between opposing educational objectives so apparent; on the one hand, the Singapore government has a paranoid obsession with control and conformity, and on the other, it repeatedly exhorts its citizens to be more ‘creative’, and has introduced Thinking Schools’ (what other kind could there be, one wonders). Of course Asian dictatorships are not the only places in the world where destruction is wreaked upon children’s capacities to marshal representational modes. Indeed, it is interesting, if not sinister, how similar are so many ‘national’ curricular around the world. The curriculum is usually conceived in terms of the content of a subject area to be transmitted to children. Art curricular often assume the deficit model of development I have criticized in this book, and set out programmes of instruction designed to correct the supposed limitations and obstacles in the child’s representational and visual thinking until he or she can represent in ways which are acceptable. Ideas about drawing from ‘imagination’, ‘memory’ and from ‘observation’ are often bolted together, together with vague demands that children should be ‘creative’. However, when one takes this apart one finds the assumed goal of development remains a linear path toward a form of naïve realism, or some other limited model of image-making. Until very recently, this has been the case in England. The work of those who designed and practised a developmental approach to education, in which the curriculum is planned with reference to processes of human development, has been systematically savaged by years of repressive government (Blenkin and Kelly, 1996; Bruce, 1987, 1991). According to Blenkin and Kelly, the subject area is only significant in terms of the way it interacts with the learner’s development. This means that the subject domain is important only insofar as it contains instruments, experiences and processes which will promote intellectual and emotional development. Even though, in January 1998, the Labour Government of Britain dispensed with fixed Attainment Targets and fixed Programmes of Study for everything except English, Mathematics and Science, it is doubtful whether this new administration will move fundamentally away from a transmission model of education. This ‘slimmed down’ curriculum still assumes the now obsolete paradigm of what it means to be literate and numerate, and will probably push the arts further to the periphery of the curriculum. Most contemporary governments conceive of education in terms of a ‘core curriculum’ of fixed bodies of knowledge to be transmitted to the learner. Until teachers develop a theoretical framework which underpins their own profession, their work will always be hijacked by politicians acting upon the prejudices of their voters (Blenkin and Kelly, 1996). I have been extremely critical of heavy-handed transmission and rote-learning methods, but on the other hand, children’s art does not develop very far without interpersonal support. The forms of interaction and provision depend on the teacher or caregiver identifying the modes of representation and expression generated from within the child and supplying the appropriate content, to nourish these unfolding structures. This content is incorporated into the child’s programmes of representation insofar as he or she is generating the structures which comprise this content. The modes of representation change with age, practice and also the kind and quality of teacher interaction and provision. This interaction involves a field of discourse shared between adult and child in which the adult uses his or her greater experience as a learner, and identifies and helps the child bring to consciousness the structures the child is generating. The task of this ‘more experienced learner’ (Blenkin, 1990, personal communication) is to help the child transform their representations from one mode to another (Matthews, 1994a).

158

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

In later childhood, this will involve the teacher identifying children’s modes of representation which may look strange as compared to a naïve realistic model, but which nevertheless are powerful and legitimate representational approaches or systems, and which together form a powerful description of reality. In adolescence, the provision may become more specialized, involving tasks and teacher-initiated exercises. However, these will be designed with reference to the deep structural principles which I have outlined in the book. In adolescence, it may mean helping the child reflect upon and articulate consciously the forms and relations in their artwork and how these function expressively and representationally. It may mean recognizing and assisting the young person’s own burgeoning forms of metaphor and meaning. This book has argued that, if the modes of expression and representation through which children understand their worlds are to develop, then certain optimal conditions must be met, regardless of cultural, religious or social setting. All the levels and basic principles of teaching and provision are present in good interaction and support in the early years. I wish now to close the book by using two examples of good interaction and provision, which share basic features, but which are from very different cultural settings. The first one I mentioned in Chapter 4 (see p. 32), when Linda supported Hannah’s painting of red ‘raspberrries’ and blue trails. I will describe it here in a little more detail, because analysis of its structure in time shows how important is the interpersonal dimension. Linda and Hannah In this episode the child is not only mastering objects and art materials, she is playing with ideas. She is able to develop these ideas to the extent that a supportive adult, her mother, Linda, at some level comprehends them. The squelching of the brush in the pot seems to prompt the ‘ideas’ on which her following painting episode is based. When Hannah presses her paint brush against the paper she emits from her mouth a farting or ‘raspberry’ sound. She stabs the brush down again to the same point, synchronizing a raspberry sound to the moment of impact. She raises the brush about 15 cms above the surface and looks toward her mother, Linda, who returns her glance, her face showing interest and anticipation expressed in subtle movements of her head and lips. Hannah then develops this into a dance-like movement of the stabbing brush, moving in an arcing journey from her right side of the paper to the left, each impact of the brush synchronized in one-to-one correspondence with a raspberry sound. During this event, her mother’s mouth opens into a broad smile of appreciation and understanding. After the eighth stab, she makes a longer pause, looking toward Linda, who smiles at her, just re-aligning her eye-gaze toward her, and then immediately returning her line-of-sight back toward the field of action. Perhaps in response to the direction of Linda’s gaze, Hannah then returns her own gaze to the paper and makes three more impacts, continuing a series of powerful, staccato collisions of the brush against the paper, whilst gradually releasing her breath in an audible sigh as she increases the tempo of the dance. From impact 11 to 24, she no longer synchronizes vocals, but crashes the brush down at around the same locale till impact 18 when, gradually rotating from her hips and shoulders, she makes a series of spots describing a wide arc away from her and around to her left. The last impact is translated into a pull stroke. In slow motion it is clear that, with an inclination of her head, she visually tracks the trailing stroke and this seems to give her a new idea. She is about to dip her brush into the red paint pot but changes her mind and retrieves its lid and starts to replace it. She then selects a pot of blue paint. Without taking over control of the task, Linda assists Hannah replace the paint-pot lid. In slow motion, we can see the exquisitely orchestrated balletic interplay of hers and her mother’s helping hands. Linda only supports this task—at no time does she take the lid or the pot away from the child. In this way she gives Hannah a sense of satisfaction of being in control of the situation. Then Hannah retrieves the blue pot. With the brush loaded with blue paint, and the blue pot standing at around the centre of the paper, Hannah now makes a marking action quite different from those she made with red paint. She now

REPRESENTATION AND HUMAN FREEDOM

159

makes a trailing blue line on a slow circuit around the blue pot which serves as an axis. As she makes this trailing line she makes quiet ‘shhhhhhhh’-ing sound. As I have argued, this painting event is self-initiated and self-generated. Nevertheless, the child is able to sustain and extend these dynamic structures and their rich possibilities, in terms of structure, expression, representation and humour, only to the extent she receives the subtle and discreet support from her mother, Linda. Yet Linda says only a very few words, and appears motionless most of the time. Even when she assists Hannah in the removal of the paint-pot lid, at no time does she either literally or metaphorically take the task out of the child’s hands. In this way she gives Hannah a sense of satisfaction of being in control of the situation. Most of the time, the communication consists of exchanged glances, and the subtlest nuances of facial expression and body movement. She carefully respects Hannah’s field of view, ‘scaffolding’ the task occasionally (Gray, 1978) but only when necessary, most of the time moving out of this spatio-temporal theatre. Linda observes closely, but not in a passive way. Observation here is a dynamic activity, in which the emotional engagement is such that her face and body are never quite still but are activated in subtle ways by the events she sees unfolding on the painting surface, and by her identification and imaginative participation with Hannah’s efforts. She has the confidence and understanding to do apparently nothing, yet paradoxically, a great deal. This support is empathic, and is built upon those ‘shared acts of cognizance’ (Trevarthen, 1980, 1988) of early infancy. Both infant and mother share a field of view which is also a field of action. This consists not only of the physical surface of the paper, the pots of paint and brushes and so on, it is also a window opening onto a variety of potential but unknown futures. Using the terms with which Ray Jackendoff (1994) described language, it is a ‘window on consciousness’. Neither mother nor child has any idea about where the painting will go. This has implications for pedagogy. Simplistic ‘aims and objectives’ curriculum design is usually pitched at the most trivial level; it has neither the words nor the concepts to address and accommodate the deepest and profoundest level of teaching. Such a painting episode cannot be ‘planned’ in the usual way plans are conceived by contemporary governments obsessed with social and national control. This brings me to my last example of good teaching, this time within a highly repressive society. Chan Hwee Huang and Kingsley The scene is a nursery class in Singapore. A group of 3-year-olds are constructing with blocks and other construction toys. Kingsley, aged 2 years 10 months, builds a tower of wooden blocks next to the young female teacher, Chan Hwee Huang. They both sit on the floor: he, on his bottom, with his legs curled round before him; she, cross-legged. Like the English mother I discussed earlier, this Chinese teacher seems to be doing very little. She only occasionally says a few words to the boy, bending over close to him and speaking into his ear; and she hardly moves. Yet what she does is crucial to his development. For nearly the entire session, which lasts over an hour, she carefully attends to what Kingsley is doing. She does not interfere, yet she nearly always conveys a sense of being completely involved in his activity. Like Linda with Hannah, Hwee Huang respects Kingsley’s field of view, and his point of view. She sometimes anticipates his moves, building up a little collection of blocks he is likely to need, or has a wooden block to offer in her hand, within his field of view, at just the precise moment he looks down for a new piece. For his part, when he chooses a block, he sometimes shows it to her for approval. Sometimes it is enough for him to simply touch a new block against her leg. Sometimes she will drop a new block into his field of action, in the open space formed between his crossed legs. She times these moves with skill and precision, interjecting her actions into the rhythmic interstices in his actions, so that the flow of the play is not disrupted and remains seamless. There occur many accidents, as Kingsley tries to make his tower higher. These accidents are greeted with an openmouthed, smiling ‘Ohh!’ from Hwee Huang, showing that this is not an error and that it is in fact enjoyable. Kingsley is thus encouraged to view these collapses without despair. Hwee Huang immediately starts helping collect blocks together again for him; retrieving rolling columns, stacking blocks together within his field of action. The tower gets

160

THE ART OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

higher and higher at each attempt but collapses many times. Yet at no time does Kingsley give up in despair, and at no time does Hwee Huang greet a collapse with disfavour or boredom. Toward the end of the session, one gets the feeling that Kingsley, with mounting excitement and anticipation, is building the tower intentionally toward its imminent collapse. The task demands in this stress-free, playful situation, are voluntary; there is no fear of failure, so skills acquisition is achieved by a persistence which is internally motivated and sustained by the child. This is a very important point if we wish an enjoyment of learning to continue into later life and to sustain self-motivated, autonomous learning. This teacher is not perfect. Another child tries to seize a block from Kingsley’s hand. Hwee Huang does nothing for a few seconds. She is waiting for the situation to resolve itself. She moves her hand in the field of action to assist Kingsley but is too late. Winnicott’s (1971) idea of the ‘good enough’ parent is useful here. A ‘perfect’ relationship is neither possible nor, even if such a state were attainable, desirable. As long as the optimal conditions are met and development has sufficient support, the so-called errors become an important part of its fabric. As with Linda and Hannah, some forms of interaction are extremely subtle. When Kingsley lifts the column up he notices me video-recording him and looks at me, wondering perhaps what I am doing, and he forgets building. His building block is held, now forgotten, just above his shoulder. Hwee Huang gently coaxes his building arm downward, with a subtle brush of her hand, her fingers fanning over first his forearm, and then, without pausing in their downward path, his leg. This gesture is like a gentle wave motion washing over him. It is the lightest of caresses, almost without weight, like a butterfly alighting upon him, yet it is dense with meaning. She is trying to nudge him back onto his course —a course which she interiorizes, perhaps inferring it from his actions and constructing it in her own mind, and which she helps him sustain. This is what Jerome Bruner (1964) means by ‘scaffolding’. It is not to be understood simply as a physical process; it involves a psychological empathy with the child and an understanding of what he or she might be moving toward. Nor is it a one-way process, from the teacher to the child. When it exists, it is a fluid, dynamic and often seemingly effortless dance between teacher and child. The Developmental Curriculum This approach is part of a developmental curriculum. The main principles remain the same as we move up the age range. Unlike national curricular, this approach is not defined in terms of a body of knowledge, planned a priori, and simply transmitted to the learner. Nor is it tied to the transmission of any particular culture. The subject domain is important only insofar as it contains instruments, processes and experiences which will promote human development and learning (Blenkin and Kelly, 1996). What needs to be added to our understanding of the subject discipline, is how this interacts with the learner. Only then will we be in a position to provide the kind of interaction and provision necessary to promote intellectual and emotional growth. We know that development, though self-initiated and self-generated, only fully develops because of the interrelationship between processes unfolding within the child, and what is available within the subject domain—in this case, art. However, this is not to say that any kind of provision will suffice. Indeed, some approaches to teaching are very poor indeed and sometimes, when there is a serious mismatch between the child’s internal, unfolding agenda and that of adults, they are downright destructive. This happens everywhere but it is seriously exacerbated in places which are torn between promoting creativity and the desire for total social control. Conclusion: The Ecology of Representation At the present time—in an age in which education has been hijacked by consumerist interests; when child abuse has reached an institutionalized level; when children are the targets of wars and often its soldiers—it is important to re-

REPRESENTATION AND HUMAN FREEDOM

161

evaluate childhood and its ecological niche. It is vital to understand the process of development and learning and to provide these with the optimal conditions for growth. At a deep level of description, the process of representation is universal. The elaboration of a few simple structural principles results in the high variety of imagery we see across temporal, spatial and cultural divides, as well as from individual to individual. It is what we share. If we are to understand ourselves; if we are to understand how we construct the realities in which we live, and to make these psychological and physical environments better places in which to live, then we have to understand something of the mechanisms which drive representational thought. Otherwise (as Derek Bickerton, 1981, writes about the need to understand language), we will be condemned to watch in despair as the world we have created continues to slip further and further from our grasp.

References

ALLAND, A. (1983) Playing with Form, New York: Columbia University Press. ARNHEIM, R. (1954, 1974) Art and Visual Perception: The Psychology of the Creative Eye, Berkeley: University of California Press. ARNHEIM, R. (1986) New Essays on the Psychology of Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ATHEY, C. (1977) ‘Humour in children related to Piaget’s theory of intellectual development’, in CHAPMAN, A.J. and FOOT, H.C. (eds) It’s a Funny Thing, Humour, Oxford: Pergamon Press. ATHEY, C. (1990) Extending Thought in Young Children: A Parent-Teacher Partnership, London: Paul Chapman. BICKERTON, D. (1981) The Roots of Language, Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishing. BIEDERMAN, I. (1987) ‘Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding’, Psychological Review, 94, pp. 115–47. BLENKIN, G.M. (1990) Conversation with the author, Goldsmiths College: University of London. BLENKIN, G.M. and KELLY, A.V. (eds) (1988; 1996 2nd Edn.) Early Childhood Education; A Developmental Curriculum, London: Paul Chapman. BORKE, H. (1983) ‘Piaget’s mountains revisited: Changes in the developmental landscape’, in DONALDSON, M., GRIEVES, R. and PRATT, C. (eds) Early Childhood Development and Education, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 254–9. BOWER, T.G.R. (1974, 1982 2nd edn.) Development in Infancy, San Francisco: Freeman. BREMNER, J.G. (1985) ‘Figural biases and young children’s drawings’, in FREEMAN, N.H. and Cox, M.V. (eds) (1985) Visual Order: The Nature and Development of Pictorial Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 301–31. BRETHERTON, I. (ed.) (1984) Symbolic Play, London: Academic Press. BRUCE, T. (1987) Early Childhood Education, London: Hodder & Stoughton. BRUCE, T. (1991) Time to Play in Early Childhood Education, London: Hodder & Stoughton. BRUNER, J.S. (1964) ‘The course of cognitive growth’, American Psychologist, 19, pp. 1–15. BRUNER, J.S. (1972) ‘The nature and the uses of immaturity’, in BRUNER, J.S., JOLLY, A. and SILVA, K. (eds) (1976) Play—Its Role in Development and Evolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin. BUSCH, H. and SILVER, B. (1994) Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics, Berkeley, California: Ten Speed Press. CHAFE, W. (1994) Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. CHOMSKY, N. (1966) Cartesian Linguistics, New York: Harper Row. CHOMSKY, N. (ed.) (1988) Language and Politics, Montreal: Black Rose Books. C.P.Otero. CONDON, W. (1975) ‘Speech makes babies move’, in LEWIN, R. (ed.) (1975) Child Alive, London: Temple Smith, pp. 81–90. CONNOLLY, K. (1975) ‘The growth of skill’, in LEWIN, R. (ed.) Child Alive, London: Temple Smith, pp. 137–48. COSTALL, A. (1985) ‘How meaning covers the traces’, in FREEMAN, N.H. and Cox, M.V. (eds) Visual Order: The Nature and Development of Pictorial Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 17–30. COSTALL, A. (1993) ‘Beyond linear perspective: A Cubist manifesto for visual science’, Image and Image Computing, 11, 6, July/ August, pp. 334–41. COSTALL, A. (1995) ‘The myth of the sensory core: The traditional versus the ecological approach to children’s drawings’, in LANGE-KUETTNER, C. and THOMAS, G.V. (eds) (1994) Drawing and Looking: Theoretical Approaches to Pictorial Representation in Children, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, pp. 16–26. COURT, E. (1987) Drawing on culture: Some views from rural Kenya. A paper presented at the Symposium on Social and Cultural Influences on Children’s Drawings, Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Baltimore, Maryland, 24 April 1987. Elsbeth Court, Institute of Education, University of London. Cox, M. (1991) The Child’s Point of View: The Development of Cognition and Language, New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Cox, M. (1992) Children’s Drawing, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cox, M. (1993) Children’s Drawings of the Human Figure, Hillsdale, USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

REFERENCES

163

Cox, M. (1997) Drawings of People by the Under-5’s, London: Falmer Press. DONALDSON, M. (1978) Children’s Minds, Glasgow: Fontana. DUNCUM, P. (1993) ‘Ten types of narrative drawing amongst children’s spontaneous picturemaking’, Visual Arts Research, 19, 1, pp. 20–9. DUTHIE, R.K. (1985) ‘The adolescent’s point of view: studies of form in conflict’, in FREEMAN, N.H. and Cox, M.V. (eds) (1985) Visual Order: The Nature and Development of Pictorial Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 101–20. FREEMAN, N.H. (1995) ‘The emergence of a framework theory of pictorial reasoning’, in LANGEKUETTNER, C. and THOMAS, G.V. (eds) (1994) Drawing and Looking: Theoretical Approaches to Pictorial Representation in Children, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, pp. 135–46. FREEMAN, N.H. and Cox, M.V. (eds) (1985) Visual Order: The Nature and Development of Pic-torial Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. FREIRE, P. (1972) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin. FURTH, H.G. (1969) Piaget and Knowledge, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. GARDNER, H. (1985) Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, London: Paladin. GARVEY, C. (1977) Play, London: Fontana/Open Books. GELMAN, R. and GALLISTEL, C.R. (1983) ‘The child’s understanding of number’, in DONALDSON, M., GRIEVE, R. and PRATT, C. (eds) Early Childhood Development and Education, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 185–203. GIBSON, J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. GLEICK, J. (1988) Chaos, London: Cardinal. GOLOMB, C. (1974) Young Children’s Sculpture and Drawing: A Study in Representational Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. GOLOMB, C. (1992) The Child’s Creation of a Pictorial World, Berkeley: University of California Press. GOLOMB, C. (1993) ‘Art and the young child: Another look at the developmental question’, Visual Arts Research, 19, 1, pp. 1–16. GRAY, H. (1978) ‘Learning to take an object from the mother’, in LOCK, A. (ed.) Action, Gesture and Symbol: The Emergence of Language, London: Academic Press, pp. 159–83. GURA, P. (ed.) (1992) Exploring Learning: Young Children and Blockplay, London: Paul Chapman. HARRIS, P. (1989) Children and Emotion: The Development of Psychological Understanding, Oxford: Blackwell. HILL, R. (1996) Windows on the Mind, B.B.C. Open University, Television Film, June. HUGHES, M. and DONALDSON, M. (1983) ‘The use of hiding games for studying coordination of viewpoints’, in DONALDSON, M., GRIEVES, R. and PRATT, C. (eds) Early Childhood Development and Education, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 245–53. JACKENDOFF, R. (1994) Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature, New York: Basic Books. KARMILOFF-SMITH, A. (1990) ‘Constraints on representational change: Evidence from children’s drawing’, Cognition, 34, pp. 57–83. KELLOGG, R. (1969) Analyzing Children’s Art, Palo Alto, California: National Press Books. KOENDERINK, J.J. and VAN DOORN, A.J. (1977) ‘How an ambulant observer can construct a model of the environment from the geometrical structure of the visual inflow’, in HAUSKE, G. and BUTENANDT, E. (eds) Kybernetic 1977, Oldenburg, pp. 224–47. LANGE-KUETTNER, C. and REITH, E. (1995) ‘The transformation of figurative thought: Implications of Piaget and Inhelder’s developmental theory of children’s drawings’, in LANGE-KUETTNER, C. and THOMAS, G.V. (eds) Drawing and Looking: Theoretical Approaches to Pictorial Representation in Children, Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, pp. 75–92. LASZLO, J. and BRODERICK, P. (1985) ‘The perceptual-motor skill of drawing’, in FREEMAN, N.H. and Cox, M.V. (eds) Visual Order: The Nature and Development of Pictorial Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 356–70. LIGHT, P. (1985) ‘The development of view-specific representation considered from a sociocognitive standpoint’, in FREEMAN, N.H. and Cox, M.V. (eds) Visual Order: The Nature and Development of Pictorial Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 214–29. LUQUET, G.H. (1927) Le Dessin Enfantin, Paris: Alcan. MARR, D. (1982) Vision: A Computational Investigation into Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information, San Francisco: Freeman.

164

REFERENCES

MATTHEWS, J. (1983) Children drawing: Are young children really scribbling? Paper presented at British Psychological Society’s International Conference on ‘Psychology and the Arts’, University of Cardiff. MATTHEWS, J. (1984) ‘Children drawing: Are young children really scribbling?’, Early Child Development and Care, 18, pp. 1–39. MATTHEWS, J. (1990) Expression, Representation and Drawing in Early Childhood, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of London. MATTHEWS, J. (1992) ‘The genesis of aesthetic sensibility’, in THISTLEWOOD, D. (ed.) Drawing, Research and Development, NSEAD and Longman, pp. 26–39. MATTHEWS, J. (1994a) Helping Children to Draw and Paint in Early Childhood: Children and Visual Representation, 0–8 Series, Series Editor Tina Bruce, Hodder & Stoughton. MATTHEWS, J. (1994b) ‘Deep structures in children’s art: Development and culture’, Visual Arts Research, Fall Issue. University of Illinois, USA, pp. 10–25. MATTHEWS, J. (1996a) ‘The young child’s early representation and drawing’, in BLENKIN, G.M. and KELLY, A.V. (eds) (1996 New Edn.) Early Childhood Education: A Developmental Curriculum, London: Paul Chapman, pp. 150–83. MATTHEWS, J. (1996b) ‘Art education as a form of child abuse’, in KRISHNAN, S., KUTTAN, S., LEE, W.C., PERERA, L. and YAP, J. (eds) Looking at Culture, Artres Design & Communications: Singapore, pp. 55–60. MATTHEWS, J. (1997a) ‘How young children learn to draw the human figure: Studies from Singapore’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, Spring, pp. 29–58. MATTHEWS, J. (1997b) ‘Liang ge dong xi bu yi yang (Mandarin for “Two objects not the same”): A study of how Singaporean children between ages 2 and 5 years differentiate, in drawing, between a sphere and an elongated, straight-sided ovoid’, Visual Arts Research, Spring, 23, 1, (Issue 45), University of Illinois 1997, USA, pp. 73–96. MATTHEWS, J. (1997c) ‘The 4 dimensional language of infancy: The interpersonal basis for art practice’, Journal of Art and Design Education, 16, 3, Oxford: NSEAD & Blackwell, pp. 285–93. MATTHEWS, J. (1998 forthcoming) Young Children Drawing Attention: New Ideas about Intellectual and Visual Realism, Singapore: National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. MATTHEWS, J. and JESSEL, J. (1993a) ‘Very young children and electronic paint: The beginnings of drawing with traditional media and computer paintbox’, (shortened version), Early Years, Spring, 13, 2, pp. 15–22, London. MATTHEWS, J. and JESSEL, J. (1993b) ‘Very young children use electronic paint: A study of the beginnings of drawing with traditional media and computer paintbox’, (original version), Visual Arts Research, Spring, 19, 1, Issue 37, University of Illinois; USA, pp. 47–62. MEADOWS, S. (1991) ‘The development of writing’, in LIGHT, P., SHELDON, S. and WOODHEAD,M. (eds) Learning to Think, London: Routledge, pp. 175–84. MICHOTTE, A. (1963) The Perception of Causality: Methuen Manual of Modern Psychology, London: Methuen. MILLER, J. (1990) Born Talking. TV Film. MOORE, V. (1986) ‘The use of a colouring task to elucidate children’s drawings of a solid cube’, British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 4, pp. 335–40. NYE, R., THOMAS, G.V. and ROBINSON, E. (1995) ‘Children’s understanding about pictures’, in LANGE-KUETTNER, C. and THOMAS, G.V. (eds) (1994) Drawing and Looking: Theoretical Approaches to Pictorial Representation in Children, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, pp. 123–34. PARTINGTON, J.T. and GRANT, C. (1984) ‘Imaginary playmates and other useful fantasies’, in SMITH, P.K. (ed.) Play in Animals and Humans, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 66–76. PETITTO, L. (1987) Gestures and Language in Apes and Children. A talk given at the Medical Research Council’s Cognitive Development Unit, London, 28 May 1987. PHILLIPS, W.A., HOBBS, S.B. and PRATT, F.R. (1978) ‘Intellectual realism in children’s drawings of cubes’, Cognition, 6, pp. 15–33. PIAGET, J. (1951) Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. PIAGET, J. and INHELDER, B. (1956) The Child’s Conception of Space, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. PIAGET, J. and INHELDER, B. (1966, 1971) Mental Imagery in the Child, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. PRATT, F.R. (1983) ‘Intellectual realism in children’s copies of cubes and straight lines’, in ROGERS, D. and SLOBODA, J.A. (eds) The Acquisition of Symbolic Skills, New York: Plenum, pp. 53–63.

REFERENCES

165

RAWSON, P. (1982) A talk on drawing given to the Art Teacher’s Certificate course, Faculty of Education, Goldsmiths College, University of London. REDDY, V. (1991) ‘Playing with others’ expectation: Teasing and mucking about in the first year’, in WHITEN, A. (ed.) Natural Theories of Mind, London: Blackwell, pp. 143–58. RICHARDS, M. (1980) Infancy: World of the Newborn, London: Harper Row. SELFE, L. (1977) Nadia: A Case of Extraordinary Drawing Ability in an Autistic Child, London: Academic Press. SMITH, N.R. (1983) Experience and Art: Teaching Children to Paint, Columbia University New York: Teachers College Press. SMITH, N.R. (1992) ‘Development of the aesthetic in children’s drawings’, in THISTLEWOOD, D. (ed.) Drawing, Research and Development, NSEAD & Longmann: pp. 130–14. SMITH, N. AND THE DRAWING STUDY GROUP (1997) Observation Drawing with Children: A Framework for Teachers, New York & London: Columbia University Teachers’ College Press. SOMERVILLE, S.C. (1983) ‘Individual drawing styles of three children from five to seven years’, in ROGERS, D.R. and SLOBODA, J.A. (eds) Acquisition of Symbolic Skills, Plenum, London: pp. 89–96. SPELKE, E. (1985) ‘Perception of unity, persistence and identity: Thoughts on infants’ conceptions of objects’, in MEHLER, J. and Fox, R. (eds) Neonate Cognition: Beyond the Blooming, Buzzing Confusion, New Jersey: Erlbaum, pp. 98–113. STERN, W. (1930) Psychology of Early Childhood, London: George Allen & Unwin. STETSENKO, A. (1995) ‘The psychological function of children’s drawing: A Vygotskian perspective’, in LANGE-KUETTNER, C. and THOMAS, G.V. Drawing and Looking: Theoretical Approaches to Pictorial Representation in Children, London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 147–58. SUTHERLAND, N.S. (1973) ‘Object recognition’, in CARTERETTE, E. and FRIEDMAN, M. (eds) Handbook of Perception, Vol. 3: Biology of Perceptual Systems, Academic Press. THOMAS, G.V. (1995) ‘The role of drawing strategies and skills’, in LANGE-KUETTNER, C. and THOMAS, G.V. Drawing and Looking: Theoretical Approaches to Pictorial Representation in Children, London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 107–22. THOMAS, G.V. and SILK, A.M.J. (1990) An Introduction to the Psychology of Children’s Drawings, London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. TREVARTHEN, C. (1975) ‘Early attempts at speech’, in LEWIN, R. (ed.) Child Alive, London: Temple Smith, pp. 62–80. TREVARTHEN, C. (1980) ‘The foundations of intersubjectivity: The development of interpersonal and cooperative understanding in infants’, in OLSON, D. (ed.) The Social Foundations of Language and Thought: Essays in Honour of J.S. Bruner, New York: W.W.Norton, pp. 316–42. TREVARTHEN, C. (1984) ‘How control of movement develops’, in WHITING, H.T.A. (ed.) Human Motor Actions—Bernstein Reassessed, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, pp. 223–59. TREVARTHEN, C. (1987) Motives for culture in young children: Their natural development through communication. A paper presented at the International Symposium on the Nature of Culture, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, September 1987. TREVARTHEN, C. (1988) Human communication is emotional as well as cognitive—from the start. A talk given at the Medical Research Council’s Cognitive Development Unit, Euston, London, 23 June 1998. TREVARTHEN, C. (1995) ‘Mother and baby—seeing artfully eye to eye’, in GREGORY, R., HARRIS, J., HEARD, P. and ROSE, D. (eds) The Artful Eye, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 157–200. TREVARTHEN, C. and GRANT, F. (1979) ‘Infant play and the creation of culture’, New Scientist, February, pp. 566–9. VAN SOMMERS, P. (1995) ‘Observational, experimental and neuropsychological studies of drawing’, in LANGE-KUETTNER, C. and THOMAS, G.V. Drawing and Looking: Theoretical Approaches to Pictorial Representation in Children, London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 44–61. VYGOTSKY, L.S. (1966) ‘Play and its role in the mental development of the child’, Soviet Psychology, 12, 6, pp. 62–76. VYGOTSKY, L.S. (1981) ‘The genesis of higher mental functions’, in WERTSCH, J.V. (ed.) The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology, Sharpe, New York: Armonk. VYGOTSKY, L.S. (1986) Thought and Language, Massachussetts, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. WARTOFSKY, M.W. (1980) ‘Visual scenarios: The role of representation in visual perception’, in HAGEN, M.A. (ed.) The Perception of Pictures,Vol. 2 , New York and London: Academic Press, pp. 131–52. WILLATS, J. (1977) ‘How children learn to draw realistic pictures’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 29, pp. 000–016.

166

REFERENCES

WILLATS, J. (1981) ‘What do the marks in the picture stand for? The child’s acquisition of systems of transformation and denotation’, Review of Research in Visual Arts Education, 13, pp. 78–83. WILLATS, J. (1984) ‘Getting the picture to look right as well as be right: The interaction between production and perception as a mechanism of development’, in CROZIER, W.R. and CHAPMAN, A.J. (eds) Cognitive Processes in the Perception of Art, Amsterdam: North Holland, pp. 111–25. WILLATS, J. (1985) ‘Drawing systems revisited: The role of denotational systems in children’s figure drawings’, in FREEMAN, N.H. and Cox, M.V. (eds) Visual Order: The Nature and Development of Pictorial Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 78–100. WILLATS, J. (1987) ‘Marr and pictures: An information processing account of children’s drawing’, Archives de Psychologie, 55, pp. 105–25. WILLATS, J. (1992a) ‘What is the matter with Mary Jane’s drawing?’ Drawing, Research and Development, NSEAD & Longman, pp. 141–52. WILLATS, J. (1992b) ‘The representation of extendedness in children’s drawings of sticks and discs’, Child Development, 63, pp. 692–710. WILLATS, J. (1995) ‘An information-processing approach to drawing development’, in LANGEKUETTNER, C. and THOMAS, G.V. Drawing and Looking: Theoretical Approaches to Pictorial Representation in Children, London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 27–43. WILLATS, J. (1997) Art and Representation: New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures, Princeton: University Press. WILSON, B. (1985) ‘The artistic tower of Babel: Inextricable links between culture and graphic development’, Visual Arts Research, 11, University of Illinois. pp. 90–104. WILSON, B. (1997) ‘Types of child art and alternative developmental accounts: Interpreting the interpreters’, in ROGOFF, B. (ed.), Human Development, Vol. 40, No. 3, Karger: Basel, pp. 155–68. WINNER, E. (1986) ‘Where pelicans kiss seals’, Psychology Today, 20, 8, pp. 24–35. WINNICOTT, D. (1971) Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock. WOLF, D. (1983) The origins of distinct symbolic domains: The waves of early symbolization. The example of event structuring. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Philadelphia, April 1983, Harvard Project Zero, Longfellow Hall, HGSE Cambridge, MA 02138. WOLF, D. (1984) ‘Repertoire, style and format: notions worth borrowing from children’s play’, in SMITH, P.K. (ed.) Play in Animals and Humans, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 175–93. WOLF, D. (1989) ‘Artistic learning as a conversation’, in HARGREAVES, D. (ed.) Children and the Arts, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, pp. 23–39. WOLF, D. and FUCIGNA, C. (1983) Representation before picturing. Paper presented at the Symposium on Drawing Development, British Psychological Society International Conference on Psychology and the Arts, University of Cardiff, Cardiff, Wales, 1983. WOLF, D., RYGH, J. and ALTSHULER, J. (1984) ‘Actions and states in play narratives’, in BRETHERTON, I. (ed.) Symbolic Play, London: Academic Press, pp. 195–217. WOLF, D. and PERRY, M.D. (1988) ‘From endpoints to repertoires: Some new conclusions about drawing development’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2, 1, Spring, pp. 17–34.

Index

Aaron, 2–3, 7, 31 above-below relationships, 72 abstract thinking, 97 action programmes, 24–5 action representation, 14–16, 31–2 actions, 24, 31–48 adolescence, 10–11, 142–54 aesthetic aspect, 88 aesthetic dimension, 59 affine transformations, 127, 138 aggression, 34 Alland, A., 29 Altshuler, J., 104 analogue space, 116, 147 angular attachments, 27 angular variation, 53, 106–8 apparent size change, 125 difference, 114–17, 126, 129 arcing motions, 23 arcing strokes, 21–2 Arnheim, R., 6, 42, 93, 109, 114 ascent, 52–3 movement, 38 vertical axis, 62–3 association, 56 Athey, C, 20, 32, 34, 52, 56, 57 going-through, 70 movement, 20 Teletubbies, 104, 158 Atkinson, D., 8 attractors, 12, 29, 35, 61, 80, 90, 99, 104, 155 autistic children, 29

Ben, 24, 34–7, 38, 40, 41–2, 77–8 ‘A Motor-Bike Made Completely Out of Bananas’, 133 ‘A Red Indian walking Towards You’, 115–16 above-below relationships, 72 ‘Absorption’, 150, 152 adolescence, 142–3 arcs, 64 ‘Astronaut’s Footprint on the Moon’, 102 belts, 124 The Big Wheel’, 34 ‘Boat Taking Off Out of Water’, 92 ‘Car Burning on the Side of a Hill’, 105 ‘Conquering Heroes’, 144, 152 ‘Cyclists Coming Towards You’, 129 cylinders, 122–3 ‘Dead Soldier’, 102 ‘Death Star’, 136–7 decapitation, 144–5 deconstruction of time, 98–101 depth recession, 114–15 drawing surface, 128 edge-on/face-on planes, 121–2 emergent writing, 79, 80–2 encircling objects, 122 Euclidean geometry, 78 ‘Excavator’, 106 Father Christmas, 71, 77–8, 80–1 feedback, 114 ‘Fire Coming from a Spacecraft’, 105 ‘Fire Going through a Spacecraft’, 81 ‘Fishtail’, 124 ‘Flying boat’, 102 flying saucers, 134–5 giants, 115, 125–6 horizontal arcs, 23 houses, 55, 78 interaction across media domains, 95–7

babbling, 40 behind-the-scenes symbolism, 10, 142 belts, 122, 124 167

168

INDEX

‘Linda in Dungarees’, 91–2 line-of-sight, 149 ‘Man Shooting Wolf with Bow and Arrow’, 105 ‘Midnight Obs’, 143 monster, 128 movement in space and time, 111, 112 oblique line, 124–5 occlusion, 126 ‘The Old Order Changeth, Yielding Place to New’, 150 parallel lines, 72 ‘People Standing in a crowd in the Rain’, 112 ‘Pirates Fighting’, 117–20, 127, 129 projective relations, 121 ‘Red Indian Walking Towards You’, 129 ‘Rise and Fall’, 151 Santa Claus, 139 ‘Six boys with Flags’, 105 skateboarders, 133 ‘Soldier Dies at the Edge of the Sea’, 137 ‘Soldiers’, 115 ‘Spanish Galleons’, 126 ‘Star Wars’, 131 ‘Steam Engine’, 108, 109–10 ‘Strange Sailor with Glasses’, 123 structural and denotational variation, 101–8 ‘Stumbling Heroes’, 150–1 vertical axis, 62–3 ‘Ye Olde Cure for Brain Tumas’, 145 Bestall, A., 98–9 Bevan, 89 Bickerton, D., 9, 148, 163 bicycle, 90 Blenkin, G.M., 159, 163 blobs, 26, 27 block play, 95, 102 Borke, H., 70 boundary detection, 14 taboo, 46 Bower, T.G.R., 13, 55–6 Bremner, G., 58, 100 Bremner, J.G., 106 Brendan, 68 Bretherton, L, 62 bridges, 64 brims, 122 Broderick, P., 5 Bruce, T., 96, 104, 159 Bruner, J.S., 22, 61, 162

Busch, H., 29 Campbell, 41, 89 Cezanne, 93 Chafe, W., 24, 37, 104 Chan Hwee Huang, 161–2 child-care, 25 Chinese, 79–80 Chomsky, N., 59, 116 choreography, play, 50–2 Christopher, 76–7 closed shapes, 28–9, 34, 49, 55, 56, 78–9 closeness, 113 closures, 14, 27, 45 clothing representation, 43, 112 coherence, 127–8 collinearity, 27, 120 colour, 36–7, 60 combinatorial flexibility, 61 coming-towardness, 113 compass array, 58, 104, 106–8 conceptual modes, 96, 97 conceptualization, 97 Condon, W., 7 cones, 121, 132–6 configurative aspects, 36, 37–8 configurative modes, 34, 95–6, 155 connectivity, 56 consciousness, 94–110 construction toys, 95–7 continuous displacements, 53–5 continuous lines, 25, 26, 35–7 continuous movement, 35–6 continuous rotation, 25, 26, 33, 34–5, 39, 54–5, 65, 69 contours, 46, 120–1 conventional figures, 5, 19–20, 42–3 conversational structure, 24 copying, 119, 157 copying process, 99 core and radial, 27, 57–9, 62, 96, 106 corners, 54 Costall, A, 85–6, 98, 142, 152 depth, 111 drawing surface, 93 perspective, 110 projective systems, 138 viewer-centred representation, 66 counting, 59 Court, E., 25

INDEX

covering, 35 cowboys, 123 Cox, M., 19, 42, 58–9, 70, 85, 156 creation of culture, 16 cross modal associations, 16 cross modal transference, 49 cubes, 108, 132–6 cuboidal objects, 121 cues, 23 cultural amplification, 22 cultural aspects, 33 cultural variation, 156–8 curriculum, 158–9, 162–3 cylinders, 121, 122–3 dance-like movement, 32 darkness, 102 Debbie, 43 decapitation, 144–5 deconstruction of time, 97–101 deficit model, 159 demarcated line endings, 25, 26–7, 37 denotational variation, 101–8 depth, 100, 112, 120 folds in space, 124 recession, 114–15 relations, 41, 111–12, 114–16 descent, 52–3 movement, 37, 38 vertical axis, 62–3 dialectical relationships, 8, 9 differentiation, 40–1, 42–3, 45 discontinuous displacements, 53–5 discontinuous movement, 35–6 discrete displacements in time and space, 35–7 distance, 41, 100, 113 disturbance effects, 1–2 Donaldson, M, 70, 96 dots, 26, 27, 120 double play, 117 double-knowledge, 117 drama, 137–40 drawing surface, 52–3, 127–31 drawing-centred mode, 93 Duncum, P., 8 Duthie, R.K., 134, 138 dynamic aspects, 36, 37–8 dynamic modes, 34, 95–6, 155 dynamic representation, 14, 31–2

dynamic structure, 70 dynamic thinking, 97 dynamical systems, 6–11, 49–61 dynamism, 139 edge-on, 101, 121–2, 130 Ee Ying Ying, 75, 88 electronic paint, 22, 59–61 ellipses, 136–40 embedded modes, 96, 97 emergent writing, 8, 32–3, 79–83 emotion, 17, 20 enclosing contours, 56 enclosing lines, 86 enclosing volumes, 77 encoding, 84, 86 Euclidean geometry, 88, 117–18, 137 Evan, 2–3, 7, 8, 31 event representation, 43 event scripts, 6–7, 9 event structures, 10, 33–5, 37–9, 62–83, 92, 101 expressive play, 16–17 expressive thought, 1–11 expressive values, 12–14 expressiveness, 157 ‘eye’-like shapes, 135 face-on, 121–2, 130 falling arcs, 63–4 false attachment, 120, 129 Fantasy Guardian Angels, 147 Father Christmas, 71, 77–8, 80–1, 100–1 feedback, 24, 114 fire, 2–3, 31, 95–6, 105 First Generation Structure, 15–16, 21–5, 33, 45, 103, 112 flying arc, 64 fold-out drawings, 90, 109 folds in space, 124–5 foreshortened disks, 73–7 foreshortened views, 72, 101 fortuitous realism, 84 four-dimensional language, 12–18 frames, 99 freedom, 155–63 Freeman, N.H., 85, 105 freeze-frame, 50 Freire, P., 10 frozen optical array, 142 Fucigna, C., 19, 20

169

170

INDEX

functional dependency, 34 Furth, H.G., 117 Gallistel, C.R., 32, 53, 59 Gardner, H., 155 Garvey, C., 70 Gelman, R., 32, 53, 59 Gibson, J., 5, 66, 100, 142 Gleick, J., 67, 79, 155 Goh Zhen Ying, 89 going awayness, 112, 113 going back through, 113–14 going-through, 64, 70–3, 96, 97 Golomb, C, 42, 105 Grant, C, 9, 147 Grant, F., 16 grasping actions, 21 Gray, H., 14, 161 Gura, P., 95 half spheres, 121, 134–5 handling operations, 51–2 Hannah, 16, 41, 59, 97, 141, 148, 160–1 aeroplane, 39 bridges, 64 clothing representation, 43 compass-array structures, 104, 108 continuous rotation, 54–5 descent, 53 doors, 131 emergent writing, 32–3, 80, 82 going-through, 70 man falling in dustbin, 36 moment-of-turn, 107 oblique lines, 108 proto-conversations, 13–14 push pull, 15, 22 rain drawing, 38 rotation, 57–8 vertical axis, 62 haptic information, 74 Harris, P., 50 hats, 75–6, 122, 123 hemispheres, 132–6 heroines, 147 Hidayat, 33 hidden line elimination, 46, 47, 97, 122, 126, 127, 138 hidden lines, 119 Hill, R., 156

Hobbs, S.B., 108 hopping games, 26 horizontal arcs, 15, 21–2, 23, 24, 26, 33 horses, 88 houses, 78–9, 88 hue, 140 Hughes, M., 70 human figure, 66–7, 143 see also conventional figures; tadpole figures humour, 32, 139, 145 image pool, 99 imaginary views, 125–31 imitation, 7 in-front-of and behind, 112, 119 in-lineness, 114–17 infrastructural investigation, 9, 148 Inhelder, B., 8, 28, 42, 45, 58, 71, 72, 106 inside outside relations, 7, 27, 28, 55–6 intellectual realism, 84–91 intentional action, 24, 33 interaction, 117–25 across media domains, 95–7 interactional synchrony, 7 introspection, 11 inverted U-shape, 64, 78 inverted writing, 130 invisible objects, 67–9 iterative structures, 103 Jackendoff, R., 94, 161 Jessel, J., 6, 38, 60, 61, 116 Jia Hao, 2 Jin-Yuen system, 114 Joanne, 50–1, 52, 54 Joel, 24, 64–7, 97, 131, 141 aeroplane, 35 going-through, 70 horizontal arcs, 21–2, 23 inside-outside relations, 56 invisible objects, 67–9 mountains, 38, 41, 65–7 peepo game, 16–17 rising and falling arcs, 63 trajectory play, 52 vertical axis, 62–3 ‘Join-the-dots’, 120 Joshua, 33

INDEX

Kai Neng, 76 Keira, 16–17, 40, 43, 122 Kellogg, R., 19, 58–9 Kelly, A.V., 159, 163 kinaesthetic information, 118–19 Kingsley, 161–2 Koenderink, J.J., 130, 133 Lange-Kuttner, C., 46, 67, 68, 72, 85, 92, 125 Laszlo, J., 5 Leong, J., 99–100 Li Jen, 51, 52 Li Yu, 113 Light, P., 55 Lim, Melody, 54 Linda, 13–14, 32, 160–1 linear arcing, 25 linear perspective, 114, 115, 134, 138, 140, 152 lines, 26 demarcation, 99 endings, 25, 26–7, 37 production, 111–12 lines of sight, 10, 16–17, 50, 52, 67, 71, 149 Luquet, G., 84–5 mandala, 58 Mantegna, 137 Marr, D., 5, 65, 85, 87 Meadows, 79 metacognition, 11, 82 metarepresentation, 142 Michael, 35 Michotte, A., 22 Miller, J, 40 moments-of-turn, 106–8, 123, 130, 131 Moore, V., 86 mountains, 38, 41, 65–7 movement, 31 detection, 14 in horizontal directions, 78–9 representation, 20 in space and time, 111–41 through time and space, 77–8 in vertical directions, 78–9 moving points, 26 narrative, 8, 50 Natalie, 43 natural symbols, 73

neonates, 13 nets, 86 Ng, Cindy, 76 Nigel, 37–8 numerons, 53 Nye, R., 82, 105 object contacting potentiality, 15 object mastery, 51 object scattering potentiality, 15 object structure, 10, 33–5, 37–9, 62–83 object-centred descriptions, 85–8, 90, 92–3, 102 object-centred drawings, 109 object-centred knowledge, 65, 66, 119 oblique axis, 112 oblique lines, 108, 116, 124–5 oblique orthogonals, 138 occlusion, 47, 67–9, 89, 112, 127, 138 Ben, 97, 119, 122, 126 boundaries, 46, 92 clothing, 112 peepo game, 16–17 one-to-one correspondence, 7, 32, 59 Ong Zheng Yi, 33–4 optical size change, 125 difference, 114–17, 126, 129 out-of-sight, 119 over inclusive actions, 5 overlap, 112 parallel grouped lines, 58 parallel lines, 72, 91–2, 102 parallelism, 27, 63, 78, 110 Partington, J.T., 9, 147 patterns of action, 49–52 peepo games, 16, 67 Pei Ji, 2, 7, 8 performance problems, 119 periodicity, 14 perpendicular bias, 58 Perry, M.D., 139 perspective, 72, 112–15, 134, 137–40, 152 Petitto, L., 13 Phillips, W.A., 108 Piaget, J., 12, 16, 19, 20, 42, 58, 84, 85, 106 assimilation, 81 boundary taboo, 46 closures, 28

171

172

INDEX

dialetical relationships, 8 egocentric state, 71 egocentricity, 52 parallelism, 63 perspective, 72–3 scribbling, 45 shape, 24 Three Mountain test, 67 picture primitives, 43 placeholders, 40, 43 planes, 132–6 play, 4, 9–10, 61, 104 block play, 95, 102 choreography, 50–2 double play, 117 expressive, 16–17 representational, 10, 26, 62, 104 rhythmical, 98 symbolic, 9–10, 35 trajectory, 7, 52, 114 power, control and use, 104–5 Pratt, F.R., 86, 93, 108 primary properties, 46 probabilistic futures, 9 projective geometry, 137 projective relations, 121, 123 projective systems, 110, 140–1 proprioceptive information, 118–19 proto-conversations, 7–9, 12–14 proto-views, 38, 66 provision, 117–25 push pull, 15, 22, 24, 26 railway set, 96 random actions, 33 random drawing, 33 random perturbations, 8 Rawson, P., 6 reaching actions, 21 realism, 84–91, 130 reality, 94–7, 142 Reddy, V., 32 Reith, E., 46, 67, 68, 72, 85, 92 representation, 94, 155–63 representational actions, 27 representational play, 10, 26, 62, 104 representational thought, 1–11 representational values, 12–14 rhythmic action, 24–5

rhythmic intervals, 53 rhythmic periodicities, 14 rhythmical displacements, 35 rhythmical plays, 98 Richard, 90 Richards, M., 14 right-angular attachments, 42, 56–9, 100, 106 right-angular structures, 26, 27, 79 rising arcs, 63–4 Robinson, E., 82, 105 Rosie, 33 rotation, 57 ‘round and round the garden’ game, 35, 98 Rupert Bear books, 98, 128 Rygh, J., 104 scaffolding, 161, 162 scribbling, 5, 12, 19, 29, 45, 84, 85 sculpture, 95, 134 Second Generation Structure, 25–7, 33, 59, 90, 156 secondary properties, 46 Selfe, L., 29 sensory-motoric aspect, 12, 29 serialized images, 98 seriated displacements in time and space, 25 set theory, 56 shading, 137 shadows, 120 shape, 31–48 comparison, 56 defined by line, 43–7 defined by patches, 43–7 perception, 14 Si Hui, 86 sign systems, 80 Silk, A.M.J., 113 Silver, B., 29 Smith, N., 24, 28 Smith, N.R., 6, 37 social context, 23 Somerville, S., 25 spacecraft, 132 spatial arrays, 10 spectacles, 122 Spelke, E., 13, 31 spheres, 121, 132–6 Spice Girls, 147 stage theory, 42, 84, 85 station-points see viewpoint

INDEX

Stern, W., 73 Stetsenko, A., 80, 83, 104 straight-line courses, 25–6 structural variation, 101–8 structure investigation, 39–41 stylistic differences, 25 superheroes, 104, 147 Sutherland, N.S., 65, 85, 87 symbolic play, 9–10, 35 symbolism, 4, 10, 105, 142, 148 symmetry, 59, 109 synthesis, 56, 57 Tabatha Ng, 33 tables, 87–8 tadpole figures, 1, 5, 19–20, 42–3, 46–7, 112 Teletubbies, 104, 157–8 television, 104 templates, 9, 61 texture gradients, 128–9 Third Generation Structure, 27–9, 33, 90 Thomas, G.V., 82, 105, 113, 125 three-dimensional space, 132 three-dimensional structures, 95–7 three-dimensional volumes, 121 time, deconstruction of, 97–101 timing, 17 tonal effects, 138 tone, 140 tool use, 22, 30 topological information, 88 topological representation, 46 topological views, 86 toys, 50–2 trace-making effects, 22, 24, 63 trailing strokes, 32 trajectory play, 7, 52, 114 transformation, 10, 11 travelling zigzags, 25, 26, 38, 101, 105, 156 Trevarthen, C., 8, 9, 12–14, 16, 17–18, 23, 51, 157, 161 U-shapes, 38, 73, 103, 106, 117 on baseline, 27, 64, 96 inverted, 64, 78 universality, 3, 156–8 V-shape, 66 van Doorn, A.J., 130, 133 van Sommers, P., 137

verbal tags, 59 vertical arcs, 15, 22, 24, 33 vertical axes, 62–3, 112 vertical decolage, 43 vertical stabbing, 25 view-specific information, 86 viewer-centred descriptions, 85–7, 92–3, 102 viewer-centred knowledge, 65, 66 viewpoint, 5, 10, 113, 125 ability to ignore, 68–9 adolescent art, 150 Ben, 72, 109–10 interior edges, 120 peepo game, 16–17 violence, 145 visors, 122 visual praxis, 114 visual realism, 84–91, 92 visual representation, 31 visual structures, 24 vocalizations, 2–3, 32, 37, 40, 59 descent, 53 line production, 112 volumetric solids, 28 Vygotsky, L.S, 8, 52, 69, 72, 130 Warlpiri people, 156 Wartofsky, M.W., 50 Wen Hui, 1 Willats, J., 9, 42–3, 45–6, 69, 79, 92 contours, 120 core, 56, 57 denotational values, 148 differentiation, 42–3 drawing development, 90 enclosing lines, 86 feedback, 114 foreshortened disks, 73, 76–7 interior edges, 123, 137 knowledge, 65 object-centred descriptions, 88 oblique axis, 112 Piaget, 72–3 placeholders, 40 projective systems, 110 rectangular closures, 78 viewpoints, 125 volumetric solids, 28 Wilson, B., 157

173

174

INDEX

windows on consciousness, 94–110 Winner, E., 43 Winnicott, D., 50, 104, 162 Wolf, D, 19, 104, 139 analogue space, 116, 147 behind the scenes symbolism, 10, 142 event structures, 92 interpersonal environment, 8 modes, 155 movement representation, 20 template, 9, 61 writing, 8, 32–3, 79–83, 130 x-ray drawings, 68 x-ray effect, 119 Zhen Ying, 92 zigzags, 25, 26, 38, 54, 101, 105, 156