These last errors clearly illustrate the tendency to a conventional treatment, a tendency which, as I have observed already, runs through children’s spontaneous drawings. This free conventional handling of natural forms has been illustrated in the habitual drawing of the mouth and eyes, and still more strikingly in that of the hands and feet.
Paradoxical though it may seem, these drawings, while in general bare and negligent of details, show in certain directions a quite amusing attention to them. Thus, we find at a very early stage certain details, as the pipe of the man, insisted on with extravagant emphasis; and may observe at a somewhat later stage in the elaborate drawing of hair, buttons, parasol, and so forth, a tendency to give some feature to which the child attaches value a special prominence and degree of completeness.
The art of children is a thing by itself, and must not straight away be classed with the rude art of the untrained adult. As adult, the latter has knowledge and technical resources above those of the little child; and these points of superiority show themselves, for example, in the fine delineation of animal forms by Africans and others.[[284]] At the same time, after allowing for these differences, it is, I think, incontestable that a number of characteristic traits in children’s drawings are reflected in those of untutored savages.
Explanation of Facts.
Let us now see how we are to explain these characteristics. In order to do so we must try to understand what process a child’s mind goes through when he draws something, and to compare this with what passes in the mind of an adult artist. The problem has, it is evident, to do with drawing from memory or out of one’s head, for though the child may begin to draw by help of models, he develops his characteristic art in complete independence of these.
In order to draw an object from memory two things are obviously necessary. We must have at the outset an idea of the form we wish to represent, and this visual image of the form must somehow translate itself into a series of manual movements corresponding to its several parts. In other words, it presupposes both an initial conception and a correlated process of execution.
In psychological language this correlation or co-ordination between the idea of a form and the carrying out of the necessary movements of the hand is expressed by saying that the visual image, say, of the curve of the full face, calls up the associated image of the manual movement. This last, again, may mean either the visual image of the hand executing the required movement, or the image of the muscular sensations experienced when the arm is moved in the required way, or possibly both of these.
The process of drawing a whole form is of course more complex than this, each step in the operation being adjusted to preceding steps. How far the movements of the draughtsman’s hands are guided here by a visual image of the form, which remains present throughout, how far by attention to what has already been set down, may not be quite certain. Judging from my own case, I should describe the process somewhat after this fashion. In drawing a human face we set out with a visual image of the whole, which is incomplete in respect of details, but represents roughly size and general form or outline. This image is projected indistinctly and unsteadily, of course, on the sheet of paper before us, and this projected image controls the whole operation. But as we advance we pay more and more attention to the visual presentation supplied by the portion of the drawing already produced, and only realise with any distinctness that part of the projected visual image which is just in advance of the pencil.
It is evident that the carrying out of such a prolonged operation involves a perfected mechanism of eye, brain and hand connexions; for much of the manual adjustment is instantaneous and sub-conscious. At the same time the process illustrates a very high measure of volitional control or concentration. Unless we keep the original design fixed before us, and attend at each stage to the relations of the executed to the unexecuted part, we are certain to go wrong.
Practice tends, of course, to reduce the conscious element in the process. In the case of a person accustomed to draw the outline of a human head, a cat or what not, the operation is very much one of hand-memory into which visual representations enter only faintly. The movements follow one another of themselves without the intervention of distinct visual images (whether that of the linear form or of the moving hand). There is an approach here to what happens when we put last year’s date to a letter, the hand following out an old habit.