Art and Assumptions in Childhood

I, like many, found the levels of differentiation very interesting, as general concepts are broken down into specifics. So, early child art is concerned with generalities (simple structural features) that become slowly more representational. I thought the way Arnheim proved this point was fairly ingenious: we know that children draw what they see, but we know that children see much more than they draw. They are clearly able to recognize faces and people from an incredibly early age, but a drawing of "dad" looks surprisingly like "mom" who looks quite a lot like "sister." Thus we must acknowledge that there is a simplified representation going on that is not imitation but invention (of both the final product and the tool by which to represent this simplified version of real life).

As others have also pointed out, the discussion of "tadpole" drawings shed a lot of light onto our adult assumptions about what is "present" and what is "missing" from a drawing. Having read some literature on the psychoanalytic interpretation of children's drawings (which Arnheim briefly touches on), adults are very concerned with what is present/absent in a child's drawing, and also with what sizes the objects present are. Arnheim does an excellent job of explaining some of the constraints on child art that explain some of their drawing tendencies. For example, the fact that children's perceptual identity does not rely much on size, so size does not really factor into their drawings. Size can designate importance, but more often shows a relationship between things.

I was also amused (and surprised) to think about the enduring impossibility of the child house design that places the figure within a (2D) house so he can be seen. This is problematic when we expand the scene to 3D, where the house is then required to have no front wall in order to be able to see inside to the figure. I had not thought of this, just going along with the magic assumption that you can see through walls. Arnheim identifies this structure at work in even some of the most famous pieces by Durer and Altdorfer where "the Holy Family is housed in a building without front walls, camouflaged unconvincingly as a broken-down ruin" (p. 201). Some tendencies clearly don't disappear after childhood.