Martin Ries - Children's Art Should Be Seen

CHILDREN'S ART /
SHOULD BE SEEN....

The great contemporary artist, Pablo Picasso, once visited a children's art show and said, "At that age I could draw like Raphael ... it took me years to learn to draw like these children." This is very true; Picasso was a child prodigy with extraordinary ability and by the time he was 15 he was painting realistic masterpieces that most academic painters struggle for a life‑time to accomplish.

But Picasso was not the only person, and painting not the only profession, to study and learn from children's art. Before the advent of psychoanalysis children were considered merely incomplete adults who were tolerated until they grew up and matured; and the sooner they matured the better. Now we realize that childhood is a life of its own, which everyone has to experience; and the better the experiences in childhood the better our chances of being worthwhile adults.

Actually we can learn more from children's art than children can learn from adult art. Everyone is endowed with a normal amount of creative ability, and every child is a natural born artist. So we make a mistake when we expect, or try to force the child to draw realistically, because this is forcing him out of his natural path of development. Children are at their creative best when permitted to work out their own ideas in their own way; growth in creative expression is part of the child's general emotional and social development.

       The purpose of art education in public schools is not to train artists but to help develop healthy personalities. If the child expresses himself according to his own level and by his own means,
he becomes encouraged in his own independent thinking by expressing his own thoughts and ideas, appropriate to his own thinking and perception..
He will gain self-confidence, freedom and flexibility, be able to face new situations without difficulty and adjust to then easily. He will not only express what is on his own mind, but by being thus encouraged will learn to tackle any problem, emotional or mental, which he encourage in life.
The magic of imagination is the foundation of all creativity, in all fields.

Drawing By Patience Pittore

The child who imitates becomes dependent on others for his thinking. Dependent thinking restricts the child in his mode of expression as well as his choice of subject matter. Since the imitative child cannot give expression to his own thoughts and emotions, his dependency leads to frustrations and inhibitions and he will become restricted in his personality. Accustomed to imitating rather than expression himself, he will prefer to go along set patterns in life and not adjust to new situations as they arise, but will try to lean on others as the easiest way out.

The young child creates with six basic forms: the cross, the X, square, circle, triangle, and closed free form. These are drawn from imagination, not observation, and indicate the child' s innate feeling for balance and order. In the primary years all that the young needs is paper, crayons, acceptance, appreciation, and encouragement. Criticism or correction only makes the small child feel that he is not correctly coping with his own life, since what he is painting is an expression of his conception of reality.

The two to four year-old starts off at what is called THE SCRIBBLING STAGE. At this stage the child has no other creative intentions than to move his crayon on the paper; but this is very important in his development. He is not motivated by visual imagery; all his enjoyment and needs are in kinesthetic sensations or motor activities and their mastery. For him at this age, drawing is an activity in itself and he has no desire to relate it to any visual imagery. An Apple is merely something to eat, not put of a still‑life to draw. He enjoys making motions with a crayon on the paper, which can mean anything from "running" to "the sound of wind". At first he may not even notice the paper or realize the relationship between his own motions and the lines on the paper. But when he does discover the relationship, and when he realizes that he can repeat the performance, it is of great significance to him because it gives him the selt-assurance and knowledge that he can master a situation.

Eventually he starts naming his scribbles while going through the motions, saying, "this is a train ... this is mother going shopping," etc., although we cannot recognize the difference between the train and the mother. He is now beginning to connect imaginative ideas with scribbling. He is changing from kinesthetic thinking in terms of movement, to imaginative thinking in terms of visual pictures.

Next is the stage known as THE FIRST REPRESENTATIONAL ATTEMPTS. These children, four to eight years old, see the world differently from the way they draw it.

Drawing By : Dana Marie Affleck

They know that the figure of a man is more than a head with arms and legs sticking out; but in their representation they express only what is important to them during the process of creating. The child also draws X‑ray pictures depicting the inside and the outside simultaneously, whenever the inside is more significant to him than the outside. But most important at this time, the child achieves a concept of form and spatial realtionships. He now is conscious of his figures being on the ground, a discovery indicating that the child is becoming aware of his own relationship to his environment. Usually this is expressed by a symbol called the base line, or horizon line at the bottom of the picture, representing earth. This has great psychological implications at this stage, for it indicates the child's ability to corelate objects with one another, and find a definite order in space. In seeing himself as part of his environment, the child relates to others: which shows that he is growing out of the ego stage into a world in which he feels a part. This is also when he begins to cooperate intentionally and with understanding.

THE DAWNING REALISM STAGE comes from nine to eleven years, and the child begins to draw representationally because he is searching for his own concepts in his environment and he identifies himself with the concepts he depicts. This effort at realism is the greatest creative need at this time, and the forms he draws represent the child's knowledge of them and what is emotionally significent to him. Art education must prevent the child, at this stage, from engaging in mere photographic imitation, to which he is prone. Because his work is not an expression of the object itself, but a representation of the experience a child has with a particular object.

In the first step toward a realistic conception, the child's confidence in his own creative powers is often considerably shaken by the fact that he cannot draw as realistically as he would like. Often there is a greater stiffness than before, in the action of the figures he draws, as the child concentrates on new details and loses the overall concept. Instead of drawing a single blue line for the sky at the top of the picture, he now draws the sky a11 the way down to the ground. and in doing so he realizes that a tree will partly cover the sky; hence he becomes aware of overlapping, and another step toward visual conception has been perceived,

THE REALISTIC, or REASONING STAGE: eleven to thirteen age level. During this stage, attention shifts from the importance of the working process, or creative activity, to the final product itself. The young person is acutely aware of his environment and the work he produces. He has definite intentions of what he wants to express, and how the finished product should look. He may want to paint his environment realistically, and therefore consider shading, perspective, the changing effects of shape and color, etc; or on the other hand he may want to express subjective, emotional relationships to experience, and thus use color and form as a means of expression.

At this point two clearly different psychological types begin to appear; one type reacts more definitely toward visual stimuli, concentrates more on realistic appearances, will be eager to include correct perspective, proportions, and will concentrate more on the whole and its changing effects. He tends toward realism. The other type is more concerned with the interpretation of subjective experiences where emotion dominates art. He will express his feelings without technical interferences, concentrate more on details with which he is emotionally interested, and use exaggeration for effect; He is expressionistic.

It is very important (and difficult) for the teacher to stimulate both types in the directions of their own thinking and feeling. It would be fruitless to divert the child from his own psychological type, and it would be frustrating to him for it would confront him with experiences he could not understand. The final art product becomes more significant with increased age, reaching its peak from fifteen to seventeen years. At this age boys either abandon art altogether or become absorbed in acutely detailed schemes for the construction of space rockets, racing cars, and sail boats; while girls become preoccupied with drawings of ballet dancers and realistic renditions of brides in meticulously designed wedding dresses. A few retain enough creative ability to become professional artists; and most use their creative ability in other fields. But it would be much better if all of us could use all our creative powers in our own professions - whatever they may be.

Art is man's oldest and most basic means of expression, and is the gateway to all creativity - in business, science and personal relations: as well as art. The unfortunate child who is deprived of esthetic growth usually shows little or no feeling for organization either in their thoughts, feelings, or in their expression of them.

Art education is the education of those senses upon which civilized consciousness, intelligence, and cultivated judgments are based. It is only insofar as these senses are brought into harmonious relationship with the external world and human behavior, that an integrated personality is built up.

As architect Frank Lloyd Wright said, "Art is a natural right from an early age. ... A child should begin to work with materials just as soon as he is able to hold a ball. By holding a ball, a child gets a sense of the Universe, and there is a closeness to God. The ball or sphere leads the child to other geometric shapes - the cone, the triangle, the cylinder. He is now on the threshold of Nature itself. When the child begins to vork with materials and to create, a new world is opened to him,"

Above are some samples of art work by our grandchildren, from over the years, in the collection of my wife, Dianys Frobisher Ries.