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Drawing on the imagination in young children

N. H. Freeman

Abstract

There has been a tradition of regarding the period when children are aged something like six

or seven years as the time when great discoveries start to be made in drawing. It is true that a

flowering can occur then. We review recent experiments on asking children to draw fictional

characters, experiments that demonstrate how much support five-year-olds need before they

become relatively self-reliant in using their imaginations to generate brand new drawings.

But that can only be part of the story. Another part of the story concerns how children get

themselves organised in the period before schooling, when drawing emerges largely untaught

from scribbling. We review recent simple techniques that show how pre-school children

monitor what they are doing with the pencil and categorise shapes on the page in the course of

acquiring what deserves to be termed a 'theory of pictures'. Once we understand that theory,

then we can understand what it is that children are grappling with in the period when they are

on the threshold of discoveries that generate systematically inventive drawing, and why

engagement with understanding art is a lifelong enterprise.

Children differ amongst themselves in their understanding of art. Part of that variation

might be due to the fact that tastes differ. No one would deny the fact. But current

conceptions of taste are pretty limited. The question is, what do children conceive of the

pictures about which they express differing tastes. And we must add to that the question of

how children conceive of their role as picture-producers. The heart of the matter is that

children grow into an intuitive theory of art as they develop (see Freeman, 1995).

Presumably, encounters with challenging artworks advance the development; but whether an

individual's development be fast or slow, the first task is to formulate what it is that develops.

Copyright © 2000 Loughborough University and the Author 1

Any developing theory of art will come to encompass relations between at least four different

elements: (a) the picture plane itself with markings on it, (b) what, if anything, the markings

represent, (c) how the organisation of markings was arrived at, usually through the agency of

the artist, and (d) the role of the viewer, whether that role be conceived of as that of a passive

observer or of an active interpreter. Our task is to take a look at how we can specify changes

in the organisation of the relations between the four things, in the light of the opinions that

children express about their own drawings and other people's drawings.

The phrase 'theory of art' refers to the theory that young people acquire in the course

of their daily experiences and their encounters with artworks. It is right to call it a 'theory'.

Although the term sounds pompous, the consensus is that the term 'theory' should not just be

reserved for professional researchers and intellectuals, as though they were the only ones to

acquire organised structures of beliefs and knowledge (see Wellman, 1990). In the course of

everyday life, people acquire theories of various domains, such as the worlds of biology,

physics and everyday mathematics. The domain of the arts is no exception. Conceptions of

the visual arts involve more than developing matters of taste; people work out deep-seated

beliefs about their relation to art, and they vary in the assumptions they are readiest to make.

People acquire a set of concepts, beliefs and desires about visual art, a conceptual framework

that they use to explain to themselves what art can do for them. People do not keep to sharp

divisions in their everyday thinking. For example, Belver (1989) found very high correlations

between people's judgements of how beautiful they thought particular pictures were and how

interesting they found them. There is no sharp frontier between the two types of judgement.

People vary in how developed or coherent their theory may be. A huge variation in

conceptual organisation is to be found in people of different ages. One looks to

developmental psychology, with its wide range of difference across huge differences in age, to

expose normal differences in thinking patterns.

It is not so long ago that there was a phase in education where the arts were considered

to centre on matters of feeling and intuition that foster creativity and self-expression. So the

Copyright © 2000 Loughborough University and the Author 2

arts can. But the arts were not thought of as involving the sort of intelligence fostered by

other school subjects. That cannot possibly be true. Coming to terms with the meanings of

artworks, as both producer and viewer, involves children in making deep intellectual

discoveries. It is easy for commentators to underestimate very young children's discoveries.

In one sense the discoveries are simple, but a better term is 'fundamental', because those early

discoveries serve as the bedrock of an elaborate, developing theory of art. Let us start with

discoveries in production, noting along the way how they attest to conceptual development as

much as to mastery of the trade.

Children in nursery school experiment eagerly with drawing materials. But the

children are often more interested in the process of making marks than in what the marks look

like when they have finished. They enjoy the activity but will also end it abruptly in favour of

other activities. They characteristically pay rather fleeting attention to the finished result of

their activity. What would impel their attention to the finished product? It seems that some

conception of a fulfilled intention is a crucial development. Let us consider a bit of evidence

from children aged two and three years.

The simplest quasi-representational drawing by two-year-olds uses the picture-plane in

pretend play. Thus, children may use a marker as a pretend rabbit, say, and make it hop across

the paper, leaving traces that are a record of the hopping, like footprints in the sand (see

Freeman, 1993; Gardner and Wolf, 1987). Three things come together in such a case: (a) the

activity involved in production, (b) the referent that lends meaning, and which is (c) used as

the instrument that makes marks. Along with such activity comes scribbling. That may be

done for the fun of it, or with representational intent, or both. Even when an independent

observer cannot tell what the scribbles represent, children may claim representation if asked

what the drawing is of. But often enough no answer is forthcoming. It has been difficult for

observers who want to make statements about the roots of representation to formulate what is

going on in the scribbling phase. But in 1997, a paper by Adi-Japha, Levin and Solomon

appeared that did give an incisive indication of a nascent representational process at work. It

Copyright © 2000 Loughborough University and the Author 3

transpires that experimenters had been asking children the right question but under the wrong

conditions. At first sight, the paper we are going to consider seems to be a trivial advance in

technique. But the advance enabled the experimenters to introduce a battery of new

conditions that cumulatively led to an incisive suggestion. The technique was to ask two-

year-old scribblers about parts of their scribble rather than about the finished product as a

whole. The experimenters were careful to point to examples of two types of mark in the

scribbles when they asked children what those parts were. One type of mark was a smooth

sweep, defined in terms of the geometry of production as recorded from the electronic bitpad

on which the children drew. The results here were the usual: sometimes some children would

say that the mark was something, a cat or a hat or whatever, and sometimes no answer was

made. But when the type of mark was inflected with a sort of V-shape somewhere in it, or

was a broken line, the number of representational claims made by the children significantly

increased. The suggestion is that the act of making an inflection in a line involves some

investment of attention, as can be detected from the kinematics of the children's production on

a bitpad (their speed of pen-sweep, for instance). When a line discontinuously changes

direction, an effort of close control is needed in wielding the pen. The suggestion is that this

effort of the producer primed a willingness to make an act of representational interpretation.

Is that suggestion warranted? On its own, the inflection-advantage could mean almost

anything. The significance of the finding lies in another condition which the experimenter

ran. The inflection-advantage disappeared if the experimenter herself produced a tracing of

the child's scribble and questioned the child about that. So it was not the case that the

inflection-advantage was due entirely to differences between smooth and jagged marks. That

is fully congruent with the suggestion that the crucial factor is the child's registration of her

own effort as a producer. There is no suggestion that the representations claimed by the

children were anything other than post-hoc. But that is not a weakness in the finding. Indeed,

there is a sense in which the finding is stronger if it is the case that the children were not

recalling a representational intention but were seeing a significance in the mark because of a

memory of an effort of production that was fulfilled in a change in direction on the picture

Copyright © 2000 Loughborough University and the Author 4

plane. It was suggested above that some conception of a fulfilled intention is important in

coming to value the product. Two-year-olds' representational conception may be entirely or

mostly rationalisation after the act; but that is consonant with a long tradition of arguing that

young children learn by doing. If the child is aware of having concentrated on controlling the

direction of the pen, she takes it that effort merits significance. Or maybe that one effort

should be followed up by another effort, this time in studying the mark to see what its

significance might be when the adult shows that he is interested in that mark. The mentality

of two-year-olds is a bit obscure: it is a real achievement when experimenters find out

anything much.

It should be noted that the inflection-advantage also disappeared if there was a long

delay (long for a two-year-old, that is) before the questioning was done. That is further

evidence that the fresh memory of production was important, not just the shape of the mark.

It is not until some three years of age that evidence emerges for a conception of the fulfilment

of a prior intention. For such evidence, we can look to a paper by Bloom and Markson

(1998), where again the suggestion is that doing is important, not just the shape of the mark

on the paper.

Let us set the work in the context of a traditional problem in philosophical aesthetics.

Is an artist's involvement in production a necessary condition for something to be a

representational picture? It is, in principle, possible for an ant to leave a trace on the sand that

looks very like Winston Churchill (see Putnam, 1981). The pattern on the sand is a natural

kind, produced by a force of nature. Here nature supersedes the role of the artist. Someone

might be willing to claim the role of artist and thereby turn the sand pattern into a picture.

One could take a cast of the sand pattern and put it on display. Such is the logic behind the

gallery display of objets trouvés. The resulting products rely for their effect on the ambiguity

between attributing responsibility to the natural producer and to the keen eye of the artist. It

is no accident that Damien Hirst's shark, framed in a tank, and Carl André's unframed bricks,

challenge the hard-won reasoning of a vast section of the viewing public. The challenge is to

Copyright © 2000 Loughborough University and the Author 5

believe that there is a representation to be discussed. How do three-year-olds respond to a

child-centred analogue of the problem? Gelman and Ebeling (1997) showed three-year-olds a

variety of crude pictures, each of which could be seen as representational of an object (a bear,

for instance). A set of the pictures was given to a group of children with the remark that the

pictures were intentionally produced, so those pictures represented the efforts of an artist

(even if the pictures were not very good). The same set of pictures was shown to a matched

group of children with the introduction that the pictures had been produced by accident, like

paint being spilled onto the page. The data came from asking children to describe each

picture after it had been introduced as being intentional or as accidental. The crucial data are

the extent to which children mentioned the name of the object that could be seen as

represented in the picture. That tendency was much stronger in the intentional condition.

Naturally, this finding is open to different interpretations. Perhaps the experimenter's remarks

about prior intention alerted children that something or other was being attempted, so they

had the mental set of looking for something to say about a picture, and the representational

content grabbed their attention. Yet if the representational content was that highly attention-

grabbing, one would expect children in the accidental condition to comment on it. There is a

way of starting to investigate how the effect works. It would be to vary the recognisability of

what could be seen in pictures, so one could see if (a) the prior-intention effect applied across

the board to pictures of different levels of recognisability, just occurring more frequently in

one group than the other, or (b) scaled out so that one group lowered their criterion for

depiction and accepted cruder pictures as representational. That is, one can start to model

what is going on in the child's mind by varying intention against apparent successfulness of

the product as it looks to a viewer's eyes.

One reason for doing that bears on another fundamental problem in philosophical

aesthetics. That problem concerns what we have been cavalier about in the above exposition:

the way that marks themselves have effects regardless of the artist's intention. Pictorial

realism can be specified as 'the quality of a picture that allows us quickly and easily to

recognise what it is a picture of' (Sartwell, 1994, p. 5). Realism lies 'not in quantity of

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information but in how easily it issues' (Goodman, 1976, p. 36). It is theoretically most

interesting that characters in caricatures, which are clearly fictional transformations of

referent appearances, can often be more quickly identified than photographs, so caricatures

would be categorised by philosophers as more realistic than 'naturalistic likenesses'. Rhodes

and McLean (1990) showed that untrained adult viewers recognised caricatured birds as

accurately as they recognised undistorted images. Bird-experts found caricatures even more

recognisable than undistorted images. That is a neat finding because the bird-watchers had

not been specially trained in caricature interpretation: their expertise in discriminating the

referents gave positive transfer to picture interpretation. Caricatures are obviously examples

of artists investing intentional effort.

Let us put together the points that (a) three-year-olds seem to approach picture-

description in a representational way if a prior intention has been announced, with (b) whether

children take a realist stance on pictures. Bloom and Markson (1998) asked 24 three-year-

olds and 24 four-year-olds to make a pair of drawings of either a balloon and a lollipop, or of

the experimenter and a self-portrait. Such pairs of drawings usually turn out pretty

indistinguishable when you are that young (and sometimes the drawings are not that

recognisable to an independent viewer, either). The children then did something else for 7

minutes, and were then asked to name their drawings. There was significantly greater than

chance appropriate naming: the three-year-olds named drawings in accord with prior intention

76% of the time, and that rose to 87% in the four-year-olds. Clearly, when shape does not

distinguish the pairs of drawings, so that each is equally recognisable as representing each

referent, children take prior representational intent as the discriminating variable. Intent is

taken as a criterion when realism is equated. The authors produced a formulation that rather

reverses the usual order of exposition of why shape is so important in naming pictures as

representational: 'Children might call a picture that looks like a bird "a bird" not merely

because it looks like a bird, but because its appearance makes it likely that it was created with

the intent to represent a bird. In general, appearance - and shape in particular - is seen as an

excellent cue to intention' (Bloom and Markson, 1998, p. 203). Perhaps that bold formulation

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overstates the case? Again, one would want to see if the intention effect scaled out against

realism. An earlier attempt had been made by Bloom and Markson (1997), but they made

realism too strong. Thus, they had an artist looking at a fork and carefully drawing, but the

finished drawing looked like the spoon that lay to one side. When asked to name the drawing,

almost everyone at any age called it a spoon rather than the fork at which the artist had been

looking whilst she drew. Under a condition where the drawing was made in such a way that it

was about equally plausible as a contender for being a fork or a spoon, almost everyone, even

four-year-olds, called it a fork in accord with their construal of the artist's intention. But one

should be wary, as Bloom and Markson (1998) pointed out, because it is a sort of trick

situation really. However, it does seem reasonable to suppose that children see it as unlikely

that an artist would make a drawing that very clearly triggered a recognition of a referent

without intending to have that effect on a viewer.

Let us now take that latter point and put it in a slightly different way. At the outset, I

pointed out that a child's theory of art has to encompass relations between four things: picture,

referent, artist and viewer. It has proved possible to explain a variety of drawing strategies

from children by identifying how children use the picture to serve a communicative function

in getting a viewer to recognise a particular referent (see Cox, 1991; Davis, 1985; Freeman &

Janikoun, 1972; Lewis, Russell & Berridge, 1993; Light and McEwen, 1987; Sitton & Light,

1992). The term 'recognise' has become established in the philosophical aesthetics literature

as a broad term (see Schier, 1986; Cummins, 1996) ranging from a portrait being clear enough

for a viewer who knows Jim to recognise Jim in the picture, to a child's drawing being clear

enough so that someone who can recognise a picture of a dragon recognises that she is

looking at a child's dragon-picture. The child's conception of how to draw something that a

viewer will recognise enters into her setting her pictorial objective. Let us now apply that

notion to experiments on asking children to draw fictional things, like a 'man who doesn't

exist', as done by Karmiloff-Smith (see her 1992 book). The request to draw something 'that

doesn't exist' can be met by depicting something recognisably man-like at the same time as

depicting the fact that the referent is necessarily fictional. Both recognitions have to be

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triggered by a single picture. A request to draw 'something that doesn’t exist' bears on the

component of the child's theory that specifies what she as an artist can communicate to the

viewer.

Karmiloff-Smith simply asked children to draw a man (and a house and an animal)

that does not exist. Five-year-olds readily drew incomplete people (houses, animals), altered

the size of a body part by, say, giving the person a gigantic foot, and nine-year-olds also went

in for freely transposing anatomical relations (e.g. drawing a leg where an ear should be) so

that their monstrosities were more radically monstrous than those of the five-year-olds. Note

that we are not here discussing how well a child draws the shapes she has conceived of

drawing: the account concerns the resources she can summon up for her particular project.

Modifications to Karmiloff-Smith's design are easy to undertake. The following account is

taken from six experiments reported by Berti and Freeman (1997). The first experiment

involved 62 five-year-olds and 62 nine-year-olds. The modification was simply to ask the

children to explain how they had managed to draw their 'man who does not exist'. That

should enable one to distinguish a child who relies on an external resource like 'a ghost' or 'a

giant' from a child who relies on an internal resource and generates a picture entirely 'out of

her own head'. Not all children were explicit enough in their accounts to make the judgement,

but from those who were sufficiently explicit (36 five-year-olds and 52 nine-year-olds) a

statistically significant crossover in the data occurred. A majority of the younger children

(61%) named an external fictional character as their model, and a majority of the older

children (67%) explained how they had made up their innovation from their internal

resources. The reason why that finding is interesting is that the shift from external to internal

resources occurred despite the older children's familiarity with a greater range of fictional

characters. We asked independent judges separately to assess how innovatory each drawing

was and how pertinent and explicit each accompanying explanation was (that did not prove

too obscure a request: the judgements tallied 92% of the time). Amongst those children who

told us that they had relied on an external model which they identified for us, there was no

association between how pertinent their verbal account was and how creative the drawing was

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judged to be. That is reasonable, since a reliance on an external model does not entail that the

child will be successful in distinguishing the drawing from her normal drawing of an existing

man that we had solicited just before the experiment began. In contrast, amongst the

remaining children whom we take to have relied on internal resources in the absence of any

evidence to the contrary, there was an almost perfect association between drawing innovation

and verbal report. That is indeed interesting since there are no reasons for thinking that

graphic skill and verbal skill are in general correlated. That suggests that as internal resources

for graphic innovation increase, so does the verbal material one can effortlessly get from the

child for the purpose of discussing the enterprise.

Let us briefly pull the emphases together. Developing thinking about drawings can be

traced to two conceptions. One conception runs from artist to picture to viewer: a conception

that intention determines what a viewer should see a drawing as representing. Another

conception runs from referent to picture to viewer: a conception that the shape of a referent

determines the shape of the marks as the viewer sees them. Those two conceptions may work

together or against one another in particular cases and particular contexts. We shall shortly

consider a little evidence on that. For the moment, it is easy to see how disputes can arise

about how a picture should be regarded. It is also easy to discern how a child will further

develop. Artworks after all are more than pieces of paper with marks on them. They are

about something. This means that they must be understood and require interpretation, implicit

or explicit, on the viewer's part. That activity of interpretation is difficult for children to

understand because it requires a sophisticated insight into the agency of the viewer. As we

have traced the story up to now, there is actually rather little room for a conception of the

agency of a viewer, because such a role is squeezed between the conception of a picture as

determined by the artist's intention, and a conception that the shape of the referent is what the

viewer sees in the picture.

Let us now consider what happens when a child has to juggle with two conceptions at

once, and ask which is likely to win out at different phases in development. The question is

Copyright © 2000 Loughborough University and the Author 10

what simplifying assumptions children may make in difficult situations. The account runs as

follows. An abstract picture is looked at for the interest and beauty it may seem to have. A

representational picture is also looked at for its subject matter, and it is here that it is easiest

for young children to make a simplifying assumption. The assumption is that the picture is a

mirror of the subject matter, so that the picture picks up the attributes of the subject matter. If

the child is interested in the subject, for instance having a liking for horses, the simplifying

assumption is that horse-pictures are likely to be interesting. If the child finds horses

beautiful, the simplifying assumption is that pictures of horses are likely to be beautiful. Let

us note a small part of one study. Freeman and Sanger (1995) worked with children who had

no art training in their school, beyond the chance to paint and draw once a week at a class on

Sundays run by the local church. The children were rural children on a small island. For

these children, when asked whether an ugly thing would make a worse picture than a pretty

thing, 10 out of 12 eleven-year-olds said, 'Yes'. We asked them why that should be so. In the

main, the children's reasoning can be represented as 'if something is ugly, you would have to

draw an ugly picture, and an ugly picture is a bad picture'. That is a very neat and very simple

argument: (a) beauty or ugliness exists in the world, (b) it becomes transferred onto a picture

surface, and (c) you just map the terms 'pretty' and 'ugly' onto the terms 'good' and 'bad', so (d)

if something is ugly then it must be bad. The majority of the eleven-year-olds were absolutely

clear about their reasons. There seems to be no room for the work of Chaim Soutine or of

Francis Bacon here. Turning now to the fourteen-year-olds, 9 out of 12 of them said that it

did not follow that if something was ugly a picture of it would be bad. So we asked, "Why

not, how come, if something is really ugly it wouldn't make a worse picture?". The children

conveyed that the outcome depends on the artist's skills and enthusiasm. Now that is rather a

nice age-related shift, because what the older children were doing was spontaneously

invoking the picture-producer. That is one way in which one detects when a generative theory

is developing in the mind of a child, when she takes a straight question and gives an answer in

terms that had not been explicitly mentioned. In studies in England, exactly the same shift

occurred (Freeman and Sanger, 1993). This, time the shift (a) away from 'pictures are of

something,' to (b) an artist determining picture properties, tended to occur between the ages of

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eight and eleven years. I do not think that the three-year lag is of great interest in itself. The

point of interest lies in whether children from another culture undertake the same shift in

reasoning. This conceptual shift seems to be occurring in an English city, and a small

Caribbean island in the same sort of way, just perhaps on a different timescale. Maybe in

urban children who have art classes and a lot of magazines, round about age nine is the time at

which they pick up the generative theory which respects the power of artists.

The final question is when can we expect a theory of pictures, encompassing all the

relations between picture, referent, artist and viewer, to start to become 'automated' so that it

is ready for use without trouble or doubt. One way of getting at automated assumptions about

art is to ask people to explain what a framed picture on display means to them. There is a

single word in Spanish that means literally 'frame' but is used to refer to the whole display

piece: a cuadro. In a short study we have just completed in Gibraltar, Kyranne Parody asked

for explanations from 91 children aged between 7 and 12 years. Children were interviewed

twice, at about a week's interval, so we gave the children a great deal of opportunity to

formulate information they might want to give. Most of the children, 59 of them, mentioned

that display pieces were decorative, but only 13 mentioned any other function. None of the 7

- 8 year-olds even mentioned artists, and only 13 of the older children did. No child

mentioned the significance of the fact that someone decides to put framed pictures on display.

The results were replicated with a wider age-range by Katerina Maradaki-Kassotaki with the

Greek kathro (Maridaki-Kassotaki and Freeman, in prep.). The results were clear. Four-year-

olds and 8-year-olds told us that a kathro goes on the wall and decorates it. But the 14-year-

olds and adults told us that a kathro (a) was decorative, (b) could celebrate the work of an

artist, and (c) could let you judge the taste and education of the person who had chosen the

display items. At or before adolescence, the basic map of the pictorial domain that connects

pictures to artists and other people is fully in people's minds, ready for them to use whenever

they want, with no deep questioning needed, or prompting, or long discussion. Of course, one

also wants to look more deeply in extended interviews with younger people to see how the

map builds up in their minds.

Copyright © 2000 Loughborough University and the Author 12

 Finally, why should children abandon their naive stance that a picture necessarily

looks like what it represents or what an artist says it represents? To become aware of one's

own interpretative activity, and to allow that awareness to influence one's response to art,

requires one to be aware that the character of one's response to a work is partly a function of

one's own particular personality or situation. Such a stance amounts to abandoning the belief

that one can get the meaning of a picture simply by seeing what is objectively there to be

seen, or that viewers will all decipher the intentions of the artist in the same way. The work of

Parsons (1987) is still the most insightful book on that long drawn out process. In sum, it may

rightly be said that the young child starts by discovering that pictures look like things they

depict, and that artists produce the effects: the last thing they discover is the active mind of

the viewer.

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