I recently asked a group of small children to make a birthday card for their grandfather. I laid out crayons, markers, pencils, coloured paper, scissors and glue and reminded them that they needed to consider not what interested them, but what might interest ‘Papa’ and make him happy on his birthday.
The 2 year olds squealed with delight, picked out bright colours and stabbed at the paper, and then gnawed on the crayons. 19th Century psychoanalysts would have argued that this was normal sensory exploration of their world which demonstrated the first of Malchiodi’s stages of artistic development: scribbling. For young children drawing is an adventure, a means of exploring and learning about their surroundings.
By contrast, the five year old drew Papa with butterfly wings and a fairy crown hovering in blue skies over a gingerbread cottage perched atop a hill where she stood with the dog beneath a palm tree. She demonstrated a social awareness of a person other than herself, positioning each character in a (fantasy) contextual landscape, demonstrating the next stage of Malchiodi’s artistic development: human forms and beginning schema.
But this drawing also demonstrated something far more complex. Sir Cyril Burt, a psychologist for the London Education Office in the 1920s posited that self-directed drawing in the preschool years developed the skills necessary for learning to read and write. Holding a paintbrush and grasping a crayon prepares children for making controlled marks with a pencil. Marks gradually become shapes which are given names eg. “the yellow blob on the left is my dog and the brown blob on the right is me”. This is a huge cognitive leap: knowing that an abstract form can ‘stand for’ a palpable ‘thing’ in the real world paves the way for early lessons in literacy and numeracy eg. that the number ‘5’ corresponds to the number of fingers on their hand. ‘As they grow, children use drawing as a way of organising their thoughts and making sense of the world around them. They can experiment, develop symbols and concepts and work things out in a visual way (Marilyn Goodman, Children Draw, p.20).’
Finally, the eldest child removed herself from the group and hovered at my side: Should I use blue and red or purple and green? Should the wrapping paper on the present have dots or stripes? Should I draw the ribbon or stick one on? In his pre-adolescent stage, she is gaining more independence, developing relationships with friends at school and learning how to interact with her peers. And with this comes self-consciousness and a desire for things to be ‘right’ or ‘normal’. Malchioldi calls this stage: realism. In the pursuit of replicating objects from their world exactly, children become more concerned with how each element looks and seem to remove items from their environment in order to analyse them. They compare their drawings with others and become far more critical of their own work. This self-conscious comparison continues in adolescence when they may be insecure about their work, begin to struggle with organisation or colour; a reflection of the self-doubt they exhibit in social situations.
This is a crucial time for children; just as they stop reading for pleasure in the early adolescent years, so too do children stop drawing for pleasure. They look at their image of a square house with a triangle roof and perfect rows of grass and flowers and they know that it is not real. They know that a person is more than an oval body with a circular head and straight lines jutting out to represent limbs but they can’t draw a real person. ‘And the adults in their lives who once loved everything they drew seem less enamoured’ (Adoniou).
Children stop drawing because they think that they are not good at it. But drawing is as crucial for adolescents as it is for pre-schoolers. Drawing is a means of investigating the world and organising its elements in a meaningful way. As their world becomes more complex, drawing allows children to express the nuance of relationships and intricacies of feelings in a way that words cannot.
Only 18 months ago this child was happy to colour the page with glorious abandon and now she is only satisfied with a single perfect object in the centre of white page. I am tempted to lament this development but I need to see it for what it is – positive evidence of cognitive growth. So I remind myself that the way forward is to keep inspiring her to return to the evocative gestural mark-making she produced so intuitively as a pre-schooler. After all, the best drawing is not about realism – we have photography for that – the best drawing has personality so it should be as wonderfully varied, colourful and passionate as our children. As Picasso so eloquently put it: Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist as we grow up.
What we’re reading on this topic
Children Draw Marilyn JS Goodman
What can we learn from children’s drawings? Misty Adoniou
Line Let Loose David Maclagan
Understanding Children’s Drawing Cathy Malchiodi
Measurement of Intelligence by Drawing F.L Goodenough