I-11: Alland – Design Process and Drawing Styles in Different Cultures

Design Process in Six Cultures

"Even a cursory examination of the data shows that a considerable amount of stylistic consistency exists within each of my six subsampIes. This is most marked among children without school experience, but it occurs to some extent even among schoolchildren. Equally striking are strong stylistic differences among the six cultures, but particularly among Ponape, Taiwan, and Bali. These appear early and persist through all age groups. It is quite clear from the data that cultural influences appear early and have a strong effect on the overall style of children's drawing. Leaving aside similarities in the development of human figure drawing (there appear to be real cross-cultural regularities in this domain) generalizations about particular stages of development in children's drawing appear to be false. My data also strongly suggest that development from scribbling toward representation is not an automatic result of maturation, or even of experience with drawing. Children are often content to play with form and need not imbue this form with meaning. In most cases in Ponape, Taiwan, and Bali, when children who had drawn what appeared to me to be abstract designs were asked what their marks were or meant, they did not respond with a 'romanced' description of their work. The question did not seem to mean anything to them or to have any importance.

While this study suggests that culture plays an important role in the development of style in children's drawing it does not prove or disprove the hypothesis that universal aesthetic principles exist in humans. There are two reasons for this. First of all, it may be that such principles do not emerge until rather late in the developmental process and that when they do emerge they depend upon both inborn propensities and experience. My observation of a group of teenagers in an art class in the Ponape high school, who had been doing art for about six months prior to my visit, showed a rather spectacular emergence of skill in a short time. [Footnote: I realize that drawing skills alone are not equivalent to aesthetic rules, but the late, rapid emergence of such skills in older children who have had no previous drawing experience suggests a connection between the ability to represent and at least a part of the overall aesthetic domain and its development.] While not all the students drew with equal facility, all had learned the fundamentals of picture making and a few showed what might be called 'talent'. (The latter cases may be the result of greater interest in the art course on the part of these students, or it may be the result of the rapid emergence of certain drawing skills in a minority of them.) Secondly, any universal aesthetic principles that may underlie successful art in different cultures will have to be generative rules rather than absolute determinants of form. The fact that many different languages exist in the world cannot be taken as evidence against the existence of a universal grammar that sets the limits for all specific grammars, and we already know that art styles differ markedly from culture to culture and from one historic period to another. We cannot find universal principles in surface phenomena alone.

Although a good deal more cross-cultural work on the development of drawing as well as the development of artistic 'taste' will have to be undertaken before we can even begin to find out whether or not aesthetic universals exist, I shall suggest below that the apparently wide differences in the art work of unschooled children from Bali, Ponape, and Taiwan can be reduced to rather simple generative rules. Thus stylistic differences that appear to be quite profound can be brought about through rather small variations in drawing strategy. As I suggested in the introduction, we need to know if these variations are finite, and what the generative rules behind them are, before we can make any judgments about universal aesthetic principles in the process of making art." (Alland, 1983, p. 210-212)

Drawing Styles Among Nonschool Children in Ponape, Bali, and Taiwan

"Ponapean children tend to draw connected abstract designs that work outward from an initial mark. If more than a single aggregate is drawn early in the picture-making process, these are generally connected into what becomes a coherent whole by the time the picture is finished. In the village of Awak, drawings were primarily monochromatic, but for unknown reasons in Saladek a smaller group of children yielded a higher frequency of col or use and some stylistic differences as well. Page filling occurs in Ponape, but does not seem to be a major stylistic imperative. Drawing density is also high in some pictures, but, again, is not a consistent trait.

The Balinese pattern includes a high degree of polychromy. Most children use three or more colors and many used all but black. There is a strong tendency in Bali to fill the page with a dense array of small independent marks or simple units such as circles or ovoids. In the drawing process, the Balinese child usually begins with a relatively open placement of medium-sized marks that wander over the surface of the page. As the drawing continues, these become progressively smaller. When realistic forms are used, the rest of the page is filled in with independent, nonrepresentational marks.

Taiwanese preschool children also tend to fill the page, but this is often done with small simple or compound units rather than independent marks. These units may be abstract or representational and generally do not touch each other. Color use among Taiwanese children is not as pronounced as among Balinese children, but is more pronounced than among Ponapeans. Like the Balinese, Taiwanese children tend to begin their pictures with the largest forms and to end with smaller ones. There is a somewhat greater tendency in Taiwan to follow a linear process when filling the page.

The data on preschool children, particularly from Ponape, where the contemporary culture contains almost no visual art of any kind, suggest that representational and/or overtly symbolic art does not automatically arise at some stage in the development of children's drawing. Although some representation occurs in the preschool samples from Bali and Taiwan, it is much less pronounced than in the samples of kindergarten children from Japan and the United States. The French sample is too small and contains too many very young children to allow any firm judgments about the frequency of representation.

[...]

On the basis of my data I believe that representation and symbolism are things children are consciously or unconsciously taught to do by adults and other children. This leads to the conclusion that the only safe definition of children's drawing can be "playing with visual form." This definition should not be construed in any pejorative sense; it is offered to clarify what it is that happens when naive children are allowed to draw freely. It may also serve to distinguish between what unschooled children do when they draw and what artists do. Artists have learned to draw with some kind of plan, a factor that is not inherent in children's drawing. Artists, even those who consciously adopt a set of special randomizing rules for picture making, have a preconceived strategy for arriving at some aesthetic end, while children tend to follow what is, at most, a semiMarkov chain process in their picture making. The structures that emerge in children's drawing are built up as each move (each mark or set of related marks, but also what is already on the page) comes to influence the next move. Some artists, particularly in our own (modern) culture, have attempted to adopt this semirandom means of picture making, but this choice is made more in opposition to the way art is "normally" made than as an autonomous and spontaneous method. It is the result of a culturally determined art history rather than some natural way of making adult pictures.

The children in my sample who drew for the first time were clearly constrained by cultural influences. The data thus disconfirm most of the specific sequential schemas proposed to describe the development of art in children, particularly those that entail an orderly movement from a scribble stage to representation. I have limited the use of the term scribble to drawing heavily influenced by motor activity in order to distinguish between kinetic drawing and the production of abstract visual forms through controlled drawing. Children below a certain age will produce kinetic scribbles, but after the kinetic scribbling stage ends one cannot predict what the picture- making pattern will be in any specific culture that does not include some form of Western-style art education. On the other hand, general rules concerning drawing strategies rather than specific forms appear to have some cross-cultural validity. The set of rules offered by Goodnow (cf. chapter 1), for example, confirmed by my finding that a semi-Markov process directs emerging structure, works for drawings by young children in at least three of the cultures I studied. Thus I can suggest that certain principles of attack are held in common by children everywhere and that these general principles interact with specific conscious and unconscious culturally based rules to govern what kind of pictures children will make." (Alland, 1983, p. 212-215)