Brief ReportA new theory on children's drawings: Analyzing the role of emotion and movement in graphical development
Section snippets
The realistic perspective
The first researchers of child art concentrated on comparing children's productions to adult ones, and on wondering why the former were riddled with errors. Any misplacement was seen as proof that the child was not mature enough to reproduce reality correctly. Jean Piaget was among the first to study child art from a scientific point of view. He found that his four-stage developmental model (Piaget, 1929) could be applied to drawings, as well, and that children had an almost parallel
The artistic perspective
Lowenfeld (1952) was the author who gave the most detailed account on child art in relation to artistic expression. He believed that children's general development was linked with their creative development as well (Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1947).
The artistic approach moves the scholar's attention from “what” children are drawing to “how” they are drawing, that is, to the resources elaborated during the act of creation. According to this perspective, the object of study shifts from the graphical
The esthetic perspective
Kellogg, 1955, Kellogg, 1969 was partially influenced by Arnheim's work. Kellogg believed that the search for order and proportion was the basic principle for the disposition of figurative units into complex combinations. The scholar noted that, between the numerous scribbles, diagrams and combinations that children experiment with, the units that appeared more frequently were those that possessed good visual form or proportion. Kellogg considered these forms of visual order attractive by
The scribbling stage
Early graphical activity is often considered a mere consequence of the gesture (Papandreou, 2014, Wallon, 1950), but we believe that it is something more than a random act; we see it as something that can be exchanged inside a relationship, a way of communicating (Quaglia & Saglione, 1976). Like any activity that is essential to a child's development, drawing is generated and thrives inside a relationship that is emotionally rich and stimulating. The pleasure of creating traces would soon
Conclusions
In this paper, we have reported and analyzed the most relevant theories on child graphical development, adding our personal interpretation of this phenomenon. Overall, children have a desire to realize themselves, and do so by employing all the tools they have in their possession. They have the necessary resources, at every level of development, to recreate their own existence on paper in a satisfying manner; adults need only to appreciate and support whatever children decide to create. As
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2021, HeliyonCitation Excerpt :However, two annotations should be added to properly understand such developmental progression towards realism. First, that the fallacy of assuming that children desire for realism is inborn, which is a relic of Western aesthetics (Quaglia et al., 2015). The mind-set has changed in contemporary developmental theories from the realistic to aesthetic perspective, emphasising that a preference for abstract art in some children does not imply a developmental shortcoming of the child but is an expression of child's own aesthetic sense.
Associations Between Form, Content and Narrative in Person Picking an Apple from a Tree Drawings of Preschool Children
2021, Arts in PsychotherapyCitation Excerpt :This can be explained in several ways: the basic explanation lies in the lesser ability of boys to draw, indicated in our study in the lower As-Real scores that boys had in comparison to girls. We must also take into account that the ability to draw a person in action is still limited in preschool children (Bat Or, 2014; Goodnow, 1978), and that drawings do not reflect the knowledge that children have of objects (Quaglia, Longobardi, Iotti, & Prino, 2015). Another explanation related to development concerns verbal communication skills of boys, which are less developed than those of girls (Ardila, Rosselli, Matute, & Inozemtseva, 2011); these skills were found to be connected to children’s ability to hold task requirements in mind (Kray, Eber, & Karbach, 2008).
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