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Age-Distributed Stages Of Art Development

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Anyone who spends time with children knows they draw all the time. On paper, on tables, on themselves; children constantly explore their world through mark making and scribbling. Children can use art to help them develop other cognitive skills such as writing or anger management; and although every child progresses differently, this paper discusses the possibility of universal, age-correlated stages of art development.
Perhaps the most notable analysis in the stages of development comes from the work of Marcia Baghban (2007) who studied the link between drawing and writing in early childhood. Baghban hypothesized that children use writing and drawing as a tool for thinking, organizing ideas, and understanding experiences. In addition, she …show more content…

She shows that children begin drawing primarily as an act of pleasure stemming from the crayon pushing across paper and a mark being made. They have an innate desire to mark smooth surfaces, documented by the fact that when an adult presents children with a piece of paper and a chopstick they lose interest quickly; but if the adult replaces the chopstick with a crayon, they stay engaged for much longer (Baghban, 2007, p. 21). John Matthews further explores the scribbling stage, and how scribbling progresses with cognitive development. He shows how children use two major forms of representation: figure representation (drawing the physical object) and action representation (drawing the movement of an object) (Matthews, 1984, p. 3). Because movement attracts children, they often record it in their drawings through action representation. Figure representation shows a picture of an actual, physical object, rather than the movement of an object. For example, instead of drawing a picture of a car (figure representation) they might draw the path of the car going in circles (action representation). Children continually switch between action and figure representation as their brains handle the difference between an object and its movements, therefore, pictures often include both an object and lines dictating its movement. Together, action and figure representation reflect “the growth of feelings and ideas concerning passages of movement …show more content…

Robyn Holmes conducted a study in order to discover if children’s artwork could reveal their “knowledge of nonverbal communication and social distance” (Holmes, 1992, p. 157). The researchers asked 32 middle class children (half were 5 years old, half were 11) to draw two separate pictures: one with themselves and a stranger, one of themselves and a friend. The researchers hypothesized that children would draw strangers further away from themselves than friends, and that older children would draw the stranger farther apart than young children. The researchers measured distance between the figures in centimeters from the eye line of one face to the eyeline of the other face. The results indicated that “younger children drew strangers farther apart than older children” and that while younger girls and boys drew strangers the same distance apart, girls drew themselves closer to their friends (Holmes, 1992, p. 160). However, contrary to the hypothesis, older children drew themselves closer to a stranger than younger children. Perhaps because parents and teachers continually warn young children about ‘stranger danger.’ The study concluded that children realize that strangers should stand further apart than friends, and that factors of familiarity and age affect the children’s expression of nonverbal communication, supporting the hypothesis

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