But is it Art?

Those of you with good memories or too much time on their hands may recall that a couple of weeks ago I proposed the idea that I would, on those occasions when I ran out of old TV shows to ramble on about, share my observations/thoughts/survival lessons learned from parenthood. After last week's ruby anniversary nonsense I had planned to get back to normal this week by dazzling you all with my theory that Walt Disney;s version of "101 Dalmatians" is at least in part an allegory for the plight of persecuted minorities in Nazi Germany; but I haven't been able to get that to work at all (and anyway it's not really all that dazzling) so I'm afraid I'm going to foist more 'thoughts from the nappy end' on you instead.

With the above in mind, then, I have found myself thinking about children's drawings - no, actually that's not quite true. My daughter's Christmas play is next Friday, and she has consequently spent most of her time at home this week accompanying any activity with the soundtrack to the school play ("Ro-oll on Christmas da-a-ay," she croons, as well as, rather intriguingly, "I've been a policeman for twenty-one years"); therefore I have in fact found myself thinking about Christmas. However, being firmly determined not to start writing about Christmas until we are at the very least into December, I have also found myself trying to find anything other than Christmas to think about, and quite by chance the drawings of a child are what I have latched on to.

Well that was certainly a long preamble to a tale (do you know that's a near quotation from "The Wife of Bath's Tale" which I found myself having to endure in my A-level English course; it was very, very dull (not in itself an easy job for something containing so much sexual detail) but nevertheless it does allow me to quote it thus. How pretentious am I?) - but having now gotten to the point, let me, well, get to the point.

Kids drawings - bizarrely unrecognisable figures with large heads, misshapen limbs, purple hair and sometimes less, sometimes more than five fingers on each hand. It's an unanswerable question, but I often wonder how children see their own pictures. My daughter at about the age of two suddenly took to painting (and drawing) in a big way. And by 'a big way' I mean production-line style. Just as Ernie Wise would knock out a dozen plays before lunchtime, so my daughter would never paint a single picture when she could just as easily whip up twenty. Inevitably of course, and even allowing for quantities of them being farmed out to grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and passing double-glazing salesmen, there comes a time when you just can't keep them all, and some have alas now gone to the trash compactor. My wife and I have kept enough, though, so that if she should grow up to be a famous artist we have a nice little nest egg of early works available for auction. In the past five years, then, you can readily imagine that my daughter has produced quite a few paintings which have been gleefully presented to me with the grand declaration, "It's you!"

Now, much as I love my little girl, I have to be blunt and say that not one of her drawings has looked remotely like me. Other than the basics (head at the top, two arms, two legs) none of them has even borne a passing resemblance to me, or indeed any human being alive or dead. But every time I receive one of these lovingly-crafted works of art I desperately want to know - what does she think? Does she sit back on completion and think to herself, "Yep, that's got him, that's bleedin' photographic that is!" Or does she think, "Blimey, that's awful, doesn't look a thing like the old fool, what was I thinking?"

Or, alternatively, does she not in fact view it in that sense at all - does she (by extension, do all children) view her pictures not as a visual representation but as a mental association? By that I mean, is she not actually trying to catch the likeness of me as produce a picture which she then associates as meaning (if not looking like) 'Daddy'? The painting or drawing then is effectively a symbol rather than a photograph. A possibility?

Well maybe... Sadly it's a question I can't see me ever getting an answer to. When my daughter was younger she couldn't speak enough to answer me; when she could she was still too young to understand the question; and now of course she has inevitably developed a fragile ego, which would probably not be best attended to by her dear father pointing out that her pictures look nothing like me.

However, I do think there are clues to be had, some pointers towards a possible answer, and (as the UFO brigade would so often have us believe) maybe the truth on this occasion really is in the skies. When I was about five or six, any drawings I did that involved the outside world would always have the sky portrayed as a thin blue stripe across the top of the page. As far as I can recall everyone in my class at school did this, and although for a while I almost believed it was just us (not that I went to a school for the particularly bemused, I hasten to add) I am now convinced that in fact all children draw the sky in this way. For one thing, it is a fact reinforced by no less a wide-brimmed-hat wearing person than Terry Pratchett in his "Hogfather" book.

I can in fact vividly remember, as a moment of almost unparalleled revelation, my primary school teacher pointing out to the class that actually the sky isn't a blue strip but is 'everywhere'. I felt somehow enlightened, the recipient of some arcane wisdom, and for a few weeks thereafter I would diligently try and fill in all the background on my pictures with blue, instead of just the far more economical blue stripe. And then in time it of course occurred to me that not only is the sky not just a thin strip at the edge of space, it is also very rarely a deep navy blue, and in fact just leaving the area of sky blank in a picture is perfectly acceptable.

But from an adult's point of view, and working on the basis that all children draw the sky like this, there is an important indicator here of how the child's artistic mind works. My theory is that they build up a picture as 'just' a list of components - so a blue strip across the top of the page allows them to tick 'sky' off their list. They may, when drawing people for example, have a sense of the general relationships of things, so that the checklist of 'two eyes, nose, mouth, etc' are at least put together on the page in a semblance of a head; but the intention is never to produce a likeness. You could compare it to somebody who collects together a box of eggs, a bottle of milk, a tub of butter, and a packet of flour, and who then expects that just by putting them into a bowl together they will somehow become a cake.

Unfortunately, all this really does is (perhaps) illuminate the 'how' of a child's drawing - it still tantalisingly fails to answer my real question, which is what do they think of their drawings. Do they apply the same approach to the appraisal as they do to the production of a picture - i.e., do they mentally run through a list of what should be in the picture, and as long as they can see that all the elements are present, pronounce it good? Or do they find themselves ever and again wondering why, although all the pieces are there, it still looks nothing like the subject?

My daughter has already produced several Christmas cards for me and my wife, which I believe are currently 'hidden' in her bedside table. And doubtless on Christmas day when we receive them they will be greeted with gasps of wonder and words of praise. Maybe we're just fools to ourselves, encouraging her to produce still more unlifelike images by being so full of adulation for her work. And maybe, just maybe, she may well be thinking that this blob with the purple head and spindly legs doesn't actually look a bit like Father Christmas - when we proclaim it a masterpiece and instantly recognisable as Santa himself, will our daughter in turn find herself wondering just how on earth an adult views a picture?

Typically, as with so many questions where children are concerned, there is no real answer, or if there is, they are keeping it to themselves.

Kids eh? Tt!