Psychologist Finds Problems In Child Art

Southland Times, Issue 24153, 15 June 1940, Page 13

Psychologist Finds Problems In Child Art

Why do children draw houses the way they do? Perhaps the houses themselves are not so difficult to understand, although it’s strange that they should always be exactly the same. An uncompromising square, with a door in the middle and a window on either side. A path curving down to the gate, which looks as if it is lying on its side, and several rigid flowers acting as a border. Some fierce, abandoned-looking smoke—and how children love smoke!—usually belches forth from the chimney, while a tree rears its head hazily over the top of the roof. This is the standard idea of a house as far as children are concerned. But it’s probably only because they find irregular houses with which they are familiar too difficult to draw, and also, no doubt, disapprove of their lack of “balance.” Children love balance. You can see it in the way they draw flowers, always with a prim leaf on either side. After all, ,their houses have everything that’s necessary—a Iroof, a chimney, four walls, a door and two windows and a garden. What more do they need? Children are not really so very different from those moderns who reduce the art to a stark simplicity! COMPLEX OF COOPED CURTAINS It’s the little things like the window treatment that intrigue, one. Why, for instance, are the curtains always looped back at the base of the window, though at the top the inner edges are drawn

half-way across, meeting in the centre? Few modern children ever see curtains so arranged. In most houses nowadays they hang straight, drawn back to the sides of the windows, with, possibly a separate frill along the top. One wonders who best could interpret the problem—Einstein, an art critic, or a psychologist? Is a nine-year-old child still not in entire forgetfulness of the fact that space is curved, and therefore instinctively ready to demonstrate this with pictures of flexible material? Or, having drawn a blockhouse and a great many other straight lines, does the young artist’s eye demand mitigating curves and her brush achieve a balance of form? Perhaps, however, she has a subconscious distaste for at least one feature of domestic life, perhaps she is just bored with things as they are, with the long heavy curtains in the dining room, and those that hang straight at her bedroom window; so that in her authoritarian treatment of domestic nature she works off a repression creatively.

“DRAWN AND QUARTERED” Then there’s another thing. The windows are always quartered, divided horizontally and vertically. Why—when most houses nowadays have only casement sash windows? Most children, when you ask them, tell you they don't know themselves. Perhaps the explanation is simply that rectangular curtains over rectangular windows are too dull for wards; no cross lines, no pretty curves—why, you can't tell which is curtain and which window. There’s one more possible explanation. It may be that children’s storybooks, either old ones or new ones, with illustrations generations out of date (children are not at all critical of fashions or any anachronisms, and enjoy books that have been treasured by parents and grandparents from the days of their childhood) perhaps even traditionally designed dolls’ houses, can fix in a child’s mind an image of a curtained window that is never related to its first cause. If this be the case, then children are truly akin to those artists who claim to draw things “as they see them.” And perhaps, in their power of detaching inner vision from nonconforming reality, they are the fortunate ones.