The Art of Childhood and Adolescence

The Construction of Meaning

John Matthews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135710866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

The Art of Childhood and Adolescence is composed of completely new research on the development of representational thinking from infancy through to adolescence. It makes an important contribution to the theory of children's development and to practitioners' understanding, as well as suggesting new paths of inquiry. The book draws on highly detailed longitudinal studies, conducted over 24 years (20 in London and 4 in Singapore). Line drawings and photographs are used to illustrate important concepts. Matthews, highly respected internationally, also sheds light on current debates, such as the opposition of culturally specific and universal development in children the world over.

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 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 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 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 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 fav...