Growth

I enjoyed this week’s Arnheim reading, and its discussion of the development of visual perception and artistic creation. I have worked at the Early Childhood Center for the past three years and often find myself in the “art corner” watching the children paint, draw, glue or cut. I’ve notice tremendous shifts in painting style and scope from the two-year-olds that I worked with last year and the year before to the three/four-year-olds I teach this year. Two-year-old painting seems to be about movement and feeling. Their painting is often about the movement of the brush and the feel of the paint. This seems connected to Arnehim’s discussion on page 172 of the child painting the man mowing the lawn, because it demonstrates more of an awareness of movement than of object. At the same time, these are slightly different observations because the four-year-old was replicating the movement of the lawn mower with her paint brush while it is hard to know exactly what my two-year-olds were thinking about, perhaps they were just experimenting with moving the brush in different ways.

The group of three/four-year-olds that I work with have started painting more defined patterns and figures. Arnheim’s discussion of children’s development of an understanding of a “solid spatial trellis” and preference for the vertical or horizontal seems relevant to their painting. I have started to see the children make figures with long legs and circular bodies. I’ve also noticed that the three/fours sometimes create clearly defined patterns, for example horizontal lines in alternating colors, polka dots or a combination of lines and polka dots. The two-year-olds only sometimes made “patterns” although they were far less intentional. For example, sometimes the twos made a few dots and then continued to make more dots after discovering and being excited by the first couple of dots. However they would not alternate color. Any use of more than one color on the page was generally a sort of color mixing, i.e. experimenting with mixing blue and red and discovering purple.

Certainly, some of these developmental shifts are cognitive ones. As Arnheim discusses, a tremendous amount of perceptual development occurs. One must become aware and integrate the horizontal, the vertical, and different perspectives. Also, a child has to figure out what they want to depict and then figure out how to capture it in two-dimensional space. Additionally, they need the motor control to execute the picture. I would say, and I feel like I would be supported by Arnheim, that both cognitive and motor development are responsible for the differences between my two/threes and three/fours’ artwork.

Leaving, the children from the ECC behind, there were a number of other parts of the chapter that I found interesting. One part was what Arnheim said about representational concepts. “Representational concepts furnish the equivalent, in a particular medium, of the visual concepts one wishes to depict, and they find their external manifestation in the work of the pencil, the brush, the chisel” (169). I thought this was a really useful and interesting way of thinking about an artist’s abilities. This is the ability that most baffles me. My mother is an artist, a painter and I cannot really understand how she is able to paint what she paints. I cannot understand how she knows where to start and what to use to realize her painting. However, I can realize my visions in photography. I wonder if Arnheim would consider representational concepts to apply to photography as well, I would think so but I’m not sure.

I was struck by Arnheim’s discussion of the circle. Circles fall under Arnheim’s concept of simplicity, “the circle, which with its centric symmetry does not single out any one direction, is the simplest visual pattern” (175). He also says that circles are easiest for humans to make because of the lever construction of our limbs. Furthermore, he explains that children normally begin drawing people by drawing the circle of the head. It seems that circles are attractive and important to human’s sensibilities. Additionally, think about all of the meanings and imports circles have in our culture. There is something inherently important and comforting in a circle, which based on Arnheim’s discussion of children’s visual development, children become attuned to at a very young age.