2-3: Fein – Children Draw just as Did Their Ancestors

"Our ancestors do not stand mute before us. For at least 20 000 years, they have created marks and configurations in a process which is orderly, and which discovers and develops linear and planar structures. These practical structures are identical and everywhere obedient to laws of measurement: they are relationships of points, lines, perpendiculars, parallels and angles, and they form humanity’s scaffold for visual thinking. If we study these fundamental structures we hear our ancestors speak to us across time and the world. The unspoiled art of our children is a contemporary reiteration of these verities.

A unique combination of hand and brain produces pictorial ways to record thought and communicate it, and in the artifacts of our ancestors we see their progress from descriptive pictures to systems of numbers and language. Other animals communicate elaborately but none can draw. No other animal can leave written messages, tally, make maps, produce facsimiles of people, animals and plants, keep inventories, create memory, fabricate signs for identification, ownership and rank, record transactions and laws, draw plans for structures, and make astronomical observations alld geometry visible and permanent.

In our verbal culture, the wordless nature of art has veled its essence and diverted attention, talent and effort from the grand role visual thinking plays in the human intellect. We now have massive evidence that identical art forms spring up in each individual everywhere, and that their original 'meaning' and 'purpose' were whatever their creators needed them to be at the time. But still, when we consider visual thinking, we engage chiefly in idiosyncratic speculation about social, stylistic or mystical significance. This distracts us from the civilizing values we learn when we study artistic form. Form is what is there.

How do we study 'form'? Where do we find 'form' to study? Every day everywhere in the world, young children make a first around a pencil or crayon, or drag their fingers in earth or frosty windows, to scribble. After the scribble tells them they can be movers of a line, they quickly build upon their pictorial discoveries in a logical way. Soon they celebrate in drawings themselves, their parents, brothers and sisters, flowers and trees, their dogs and cats, their houses, the birds, the clouds, their experience.

Children draw just as did their ancestors, with orderly growing complexity: spirals, almost perfect circles, circles with lines radiating from them, circles bisected vertically and horizontally, parallel lines which maintain equal distances from each other, rectangles, oblique lines and triangles. These remarkable structures, variously referred to as 'geometric' or 'abstract', do not originate in the child’s opticaI experience, but come from an inner imperative which presents them as appropriate and practical. Discoveries seem to fall upon children in a deluge, but their drawings are disciplined, restrained, and exclude irrelevancies. They surprise and please their creators who greet their drawings with self-approving sounds and exclamations and provide enthusiastic taIl tales about them, as their ancestors provided history, myth and useful significance. Parents and teachers who watch children draw will be rewarded as they are when they listen to a child develop speech.

We have not sufficiently noted or thought studiously about the remarkable fact that our children and our ancestors follow an identical logic; the fact that all of them everywhere on earth discover the same structures which then evolve in subtlety and complexity in the same ways. These provocative and astonishing similarities, which exist everywhere in diverse time, place and materials, have received little scholarly attention except in the perceptive writings of Conrad Fiedler, Gustaf Britsch, Egon Kornmann, John Dewey, Henry Schaefer-Simmern, Desmond Morris and Rudolf Arnheim. They recognized and commend to us visual thinking as a process of artistic logic and visual order." (Fein, 1992, Preface)