III. PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF TALENT IN DRAWING
It is quite interesting to notice that the analysis of ability in reading, spelling, and arithmetic has been approached largely through studies of the particularly deficient, while in the case of drawing and music the approach has been through study of the gifted, to a greater extent.
The psychographic study of individual talent in drawing was preceded by many investigations of what children draw, at what ages various details appear in drawings, how the drawings of one group compare with those of another, and what people say about the drawings they make. These studies, up to 1915, have been brought together by Ayer, and are so well summarized by him in relation to the study of aptitude, that there is no need to summarize them again. Those who desire to become familiar with the whole literature of the psychology of drawing will do well to consult Ayer’s work.
Several analyses of ability to draw have been undertaken, some through study of the particularly deficient, some through study of the conspicuously talented. Meumann thus states the causes of inefficiency in drawing:
(1) The will to analyze and to notice forms and colors has not been stimulated.
(2) The intention to analyze may be aroused, and yet the individual may find the analysis too difficult. This is a matter of innate talent.
(3) The memory of that to be represented may be deficient. It may be incomplete or vague in form or in color. The memory of spatial relations may be inadequate. This, too, is a matter of innate talent.
(4) There may be lack of ability to hold the image during the act of drawing. This capacity is innate.
(5) The memory image and the perceptual image may not be coördinated with the movements in drawing. This capacity is innate.
(6) The sight of the drawing in its imperfection as compared with the memory image may disturb the image.
(7) The drawer may lack schemata on which to found his drawing.
(8) There may be failure to comprehend how one may project space in three dimensions upon a plane.
(9) Manual skill may fail.
(10) There may be no artistic sense.
(11) Inability to draw may arise from a combination of various of these deficiencies.
Manuel has offered the following analysis, after study of persons especially talented:
The following characteristics, each an independent or partially independent variable, seem closely related to ability in drawing:
(1) The ability mentally to note a visual form, and, by certain lines and areas, to reproduce it or significant features of it.
(2) Ability to observe.
(3) Ability to select from a complex visual situation the most representative and the most beautiful aspects.
(4) Memory for visual forms.
(5) Ability mentally to manipulate visual forms.
(6) Ability to control hand movements in accordance with visual percept or image.
(7) Ability to invent, to bring together into new artistic combinations the elements of different visual experiences.
(8) Ability to judge the beautiful in line, form, color, and composition.
(9) Ability to discriminate differences in color.
(10) Ability to discriminate differences in visual magnitude.
(11) Acuity of vision.
(12) Interest in the act and products of drawing.
(13) General intelligence.
These two analyses may serve as samples, since they include practically all the elements suggested by any other investigators. Jones has recently furnished us with additional evidence that memory of objects visually perceived and perception of perspective are probably important contributors to drawing ability. Among 264 school children in the seventh and eighth grades of the Evanston public schools, a correlation was found of .83 between visual memory and ability to draw. Perception of perspective and visual memory yielded a coefficient of .85.
As a result of administering more than twenty tests to 19 individuals gifted in drawing, Manuel concludes that, “Persons talented in drawing exhibit great individual differences in their psychophysical characteristics.” Nevertheless, tests devised to measure status in the traits listed in the analyses which have been made, would be expected to yield, finally, a psychograph of talent in each of the various kinds of drawing. Persons approximating these psychographs could then be identified as talented in drawing, and those deviating widely from them could be classified as deficient in ability to draw. The invention and standardization of such tests is a matter for further research. At present we have no means of gauging talent in drawing except by grading a finished product on a scale of drawings, like Thorndike’s “Scale for Measuring Achievement in Drawing.” Such a means does not always adequately separate talent from training.
The hope that psychographs of ability to draw may be platted in future does not mean that psychologists expect to find complete similarity among those talented in drawing. Individuality is as intrinsic in drawing as it is in handwriting. As a signature can be used for identification in the hands of experts, so a picture bears the mark of the particular psychophysical constitution that produced it. The ordinary reader of current fiction knows, by inspection, whether a given illustration has been made by May Wilson Preston or by Tony Sarg, without seeing the signature. The drawings of Clarence Day are inimitable.