8: Horizon of processual characteristics

It goes without saying that a compilation of film recordings as presented here facilitates rich insights into the early picture process, which goes far beyond the issue of a critical examination of morphological interpretations. Such genuinely processual characteristics are often not conveyed or are conveyed only indirectly in picture attributes, but are of primary significance for pictorial and aesthetic expressions as such.

The present recordings reveal the following aspects in particular:

• Early pictures are often embedded in a complex and dynamic, continuously developing and changing expression context.
• Early graphic intentionality possesses different possible characteristics, which can develop, alter or interchange; early graphic intentionality is, thus, multiple, variable and dynamic; it is often processual and not preceeding the picture production.
• Early pictures frequently do not represent single consistent products, but form a partially contingent group of manifestations of different types of graphic aspects and functions.
• The mental orientation and mindset of the children during the graphic process and with them the attentiveness and intensity of the action, can take on very different forms. This includes the oppositions of 1) exceptional attraction of the graphic act and the resulting graphic manifestations, and 2) fundamentally lacking motivation, or experiencing difficulties in the graphic execution and unpleasant sensations. – This also includes the oppositions of 1) completely independent work and the corresponding attentiveness without any relationship to other children or adults, and 2) direct interactions with continual dialogue, partly connected to direct influences by the adults or other children. – Moreover, during a graphic process children can enter into an emotional dialogue with what they graphically represent, partly associated with additional dramatisations.
• A part of early graphic expressions are independent, "self-referential". On the one hand, as mentioned, many children draw and paint outside of a dialogue relationship in the strict sense and, on the other, they frequently reject prompts on the part of the adults.
• Another part of early graphic expressions are strongly influenced, both in general through supervision, continual encouragement and motivation by the adults, as well as through actual prompts to create specific depictions. (Adults display particularly dominant wishes for depictions.) In addition, peer group effects can play an important role.
• The significance of the pictures for the children creating them has proven to be diverse and bound up in the process.
• Children continuously value their own early pictures. This includes in many cases a critical distance to success or failure of intended forms, configurations and relationships and also an awareness of their own ability or inability.
• Just as the features and configurations of early pictures have an inter-individual structure and development, so the early picture process itself − this may at least be assumed − also has an inter-individual structure and development, which goes far beyond the concrete execution process and its structure of performance.

The complexity of early graphic aspects and their possible relationship to non-graphic aspects (the complexity of their "meaning"), the particular character of early graphic intentionality,the different forms of mental orientation and mindset of the children creating the pictures, the parallelism of "self-referential" and strongly influenced pictures as well as the children's self-awareness and self-assessment of their pictorial and aesthetic expressions are at the centre of the picture process itself and its phenomenological description.

As a matter of course, the insight into the structure of early graphic expressions is of primary importance for the practice of aesthetic education. With regard to morphology, we have addressed this matter in an earlier publications (cf. Maurer und Riboni, 2007a/2010a, chapter 6-7). The present processual documents allow for supplementary comments:

• The majority of early pictures mean little to the children outside the process. This explains on a fundamental level why early aesthetic education should focus on the process rather than the product.
• The process itself is diverse and has to be described in a correspondingly differentiated manner.
• Documentation of the process has been scarce to date, however, and it is laborious to absorb. Existing foundations for aesthetic formation are accordingly fragmentary.
• The behaviour of the adults toward the children creating the pictures frequently proves to be inappropriate to the process itself. Fundamental courses of action and relationships are not recognised by the adults or are blinded out because of their preconceptions of pictures. This also applies to professionals in the field of art education.

In this way, the graphic process has to be consided as a subject matter on its own, which not only goes beyond the examination of morphology, but also beyond experimental studies of structures and strategies of the concrete graphic execution and allows a fundamental insight into the peculiarities of the early pictorial and aesthetic process. An understanding of early pictures remains fragmentary without such processual insights and the practice of aesthetic education can only partially be founded.