The Analysis Of Art
John L. Waters
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The Analysis Of Art
John L. Waters
February 10, 2001
Copyright 2001 by John L. Waters. All Rights
Reserved
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In her book entitled "Analyzing Children's Art" Rhoda
Kellogg discusses many drawings made by young
children. She has studied hundred of thousands of
drawings produced not to hang in a museum or gallery
but rather to express very youthful thoughts and
feelings. These expressions were produced by hands
making drawing movements while holding a pencil, pen,
crayon, or brush.
Often the art of older children is made by looking at
a physical object and trying to draw or paint a
reasonable facsimile of that object. The art of much
younger children isn't produced by looking at an
object and then trying to draw or paint an imitation
of a model. The younger artist is just moving his or
her hand in expression of an urge or a feeling from
within the body itself. Rhoda Kellogg discusses
these drawings and calls them "the basic scribbles."
(see pages 14-21)
Young children delight in moving their bodies for the
sheer pleasure of doing so. Body movement is
essential for growth of bones and muscles. Some of
this body movement is recorded in the art work of
young children. This work is produced before the
child has learned to make art "look nice" for other
people. It is this art which many older children and
adults consider to be "meaningless scribbles." Such
art is a record of pleasurable body movement rather
than an attempt to depict what is physically present
outside the child.
Some children take so much pleasure in moving their
bodies that they rock themselves or flutter their
hands for hours each day. More commonly a child will
produce a certain movement and then go on to produce
another movement. During an hour the normal child
will produce dozens of different body movements. But
the so-called "autistic" child will produce the same
body movement over and over, sometimes for hours at a
time. To many other people this repetitive body
movement seems to be meaningless.
From these observations we get the idea that people
tend to consider body movement meaningless unless it
enables the child to depict the external physical
world, or perform some useful work in the external
physical world. The world inside the body, and the
world inside the brain seems not to exist to many
older people. But of course we know this isn't
actually true. Everyone feels good or bad inside his
or her body, and there's a lot of neurochemical
activity and electrochemical activity inside of every
living human brain. But it seems that people don't
recognize the importance of the kinesthetic body sense
and the kinesthetic intelligence. This is suggested
by the way people think about drawings and paintings,
and the way schoolchildren are expected to sit still
in hard chairs for hours each day.
Another aspect of young children's art is this: There
are a vast number of artistic, decorative patterns and
designs which a child might draw and paint, but the
child discovers that most children and all the
teachers are interested only in the standard patterns
and conventional designs. By this I mean that when a
young child draws original shapes and patterns which
don't resemble a numeral, a letter, or some other
object which can be seen by all the children, then the
children reject the novel patterns and designs of the
more original child. The original child has invented
some decorative art, but the art is difficult for the
children to relate to some object or gestalt outside
of the art.
By observing this we get the idea that in "art class"
the children are producing a mirror image of what is
out in the external world. The framed mirror is the
framed drawing, and the work of art is a reflection in
the mirror. But there is also a microcosm inside of
the child, an inner world which the other children
can't see until the child produces some record of that
microcosm on the paper or the canvas. This is the
activity of the youngest artists, who aren't ashaped
of just moving their bodies in accord with what is
within them. But when the child gets older then the
pressure from peers and from older people forces him
or her to switch off the sense of what is within and
focus upon what is visible to everyone looking at the
external world. The "difficult" person, and the
"psychotic" person, however, continue to express what
is sensed so keenly by the younger children and by
autistic children, the joy in body movement. These
children don't settle down in a highly physically
restrictive classroom setting. Sometimes today they
are medicated.
In reality there are two basic kinds of art. There is
art which is designed to represent or suggest some
object or scene from external reality. Examples of
this art are a child's doll, which suggests a human
figure with a personality and a name. Before Barbie
there were many other kinds of doll. Another example
is the child's drawing of an apple or a pear. The
drawing is made to suggest an object recently eaten or
about to be eaten. Then there are the letters and the
numerals, which are learned by copying from the
teacher's models presented so neatly on the
blackboard.
The second basic kind of art is produced from within
the artist. It's not designed to resemble any
tangible, physical object. But in our culture, when a
child produces this kind of art, the other children
what to know what the child is trying to draw or
paint. The child may not be able to explain where
this art is coming from. He may say it is coming from
his "imagination." But since the artistic renderings
don't look realistic, or look like something the
teacher has drawn, the children feel uneasy. The
prerequisite that "art mirror the external reality" is
not being satisfied by the original child. The
original child may not be aware that his problem is
that he is original. And school is designed to
impress each naive young child with the traditional
knowledge of the culture. And in any culture the
original child is a potential threat to the
established social order.
If you look at the scratching of a chicken, you see
that from day to day the foot movements of the chicken
repeat the same movements. If we had a chicken draw
with her feet, every drawing would be rather the same.
The same scratching movements would leave a similar
trace on every framed work of art. In Heinrich
Kluver's studies of the cebus monkey, he found one
very intelligent female monkey often executed drawing
movements which were very much the same from one work
of art to another. Kluver observed that this monkey
produced this art when she was bored or baffled by a
problem. Kluver deduced that this art helped the
monkey relax the tension in her body, and it's likely
that young children who are perplexed, baffled, and
confined in hard seats feel the need to move their
bodies, kick their feet, and otherwise appear to be
"nervous." But this motor activity tends to be
repetitious and non-original.
The original child produces novel design ideas by
moving his hands and producing original art. In this
particular sense or intelligence the original child is
more capable than a nervous child, an anxious monkey,
or an instinct-driven hen or rooster. However in
schools today this kind of child isn't understood or
encouraged. School children are expected to absorb
images from the outside, and memorize these images.
But the more original child is spewing out new images.
Society will discipline this person and make him over
into a model student, if he has enough intelligence of
the first kind. That is noncreative intelligence.
In the more creative child there is a tension between
his suppressed originality, his motor-kinesthetic
intelligence, and the intelligence which the culture
honors which is the intelligence emphasized in the
playing field and in the classroom. In most children
there is not this internal tension. And the internal
tension produces stress in the child and takes a lot
of energy out of the child. The child may seem
intelligent in the usual sense, but the tension in
this child makes it impossible for him or her to
continue on in life and follow the expected social
pattern. Educators might say that this child is
"schizoid" or "schizo-affective" or
"schizophrenic."
But those terms do not explain what the problem is.
I'm not saying that every mentally disturbed person
was an unusually original child. I'm just saying that
if a child is unusually original in the sense of
drawing from within himself to produce artistic
renderings which do not resmble letters, numerals, or
anything else that is physically present in the
environment everyone can see, then this child will be
put under a lot of stress. He will be expected to
suppress the creativity which is so powerful within
him. And at a later time his blockage against this
original part of himself may break through his
defenses. At that point he won't understand all this
because no one has given him this theory, and it was
in his early childhood that society put such a stress
on him that he produced the blockage within himself.
Rhoda Kellogg shows pictures of scribbles produced by
young children in different nations. The scribbles
are very similar, quite as the henscratches from
different chickens in different nations are. And we
observe that most children aren't driven by an
internal engine of originality. It's just human
nature to be very imitative. And that's good! I mean
that's the way people are!
The original child is different. Does that mean the
original child is bad? This has long been a social
problem, what to do with the unusual person, and how
the unusual person is supposed to understand his
original and peculiar nature. Such persons have often
been repelled by society, and they've gone out into
the wilderness to find an answer to their problem.
Many died out there. A few became enlightened and
came back with a new vision of themselves as attuned
to the "Creator." But only the cleverest of these
individuals became recognized as a God. But the spark
of originality was in many more persons whom no one
clearly understood.
In this article a new theory is introduced. The
theory is that in a conventional school to produce
acceptable art the art has to reflect what is set
before the student. Acceptable art is art which
employs elements which come from outside the student.
Images of physical objects, letters, numerals, and
words all fit this category. What doesn't fit the
category are original shapes, doodles, scribbles, and
other "meaningless" records of "meaningless" body
movement. But the compulsively original child is
going to produce "meaningless" movements and
"meaningless" drawings anyway, no matter what his or
her peers and teachers say!
These compulsive children are leaders in the sense
that their bodies refuse to be trained into rigid
motionless inactivity while their minds memorize and
cogitate according to the expectations of peers and
teachers. But the unruly children themselves have no
idea of this theory! They just feel in their bodies
this compulsion to remain in motion, and unruly. And
this problem is felt at an early age, so they develop
the selfimage of being unruly, "bad" children. Some
of them are intelligent in the academic sense, but
they rarely learn to cultivate their originality. No
one presents them with this theory of originality and
gives them help and training in this "other kind" of
art.
Now the fact is that lots of people scribble and
doodle as they talk on the telephone. It may be that
people doodle and scribble as they talk on the
telephone because they feel a certain tension because
the sound of the other person talking is coming in
only through the left ear, and the brain processes the
meaning of speech in the right cerebral hemisphere.
So perhaps persons who doodle as they use the
telephone wouldn't feel the need to doodle if they
were wearing headphones which delivered the talk to
both ears. On the other hand, ordinarily people move
their bodies as they talk, and when you're sitting
with the phone held against your left ear your body
isn't free to move and make gestures. Besides the
other person isn't there to see your gestures and you
can't see his gestures, either. So a lot of the
message isn't coming through the telephone wire. A
lot is left out and your body is trying to make up for
the loss and compensate for the loss. And so you sit
and scribble. But what kind of art is this doodling?
Is it a depiction of the external reality? What kinds
of scribbles do you make?
Rhoda Kellogg shows scribbles from different cities in
different nations all around the world. The scribbles
she shows are very simple, made by small children.
But the craft of scribbling isn't developed in these
children, because they are taught to draw only from
the external realm. The art from the human internal
realm is not developed. The result is that a lot of
doodles people make are not much more refined than
henscratches.
So what would refined scribbling be? What are the
rules of scribbling? How many scientists have studied
scribbling and the internal sensibility as contrasted
from the sensibilities of taste, smell, vision,
hearing, touch, and temperature? This inner
sensibility has long been neglected by artists,
educators, and scientists alike!
When you consider the long childhood years during
which repression of this inner sensibility is the
daily schoolroom routine, you understand why it takes
such a massive personal upheaval to get a person to
throw off the socio-cultural yoke which keeps a person
from feeling the internal potency a very young child
feels when he or she is hopping, skipping, bouncing on
a bed or rocking energetically on a rocking horse.
This is the inner sensibility expressing itself. The
use of this sense is largely in feeling good, and when
a person feels good he or she is more creative and
more productive in ways suited to his or her talent
and training. But after twelve or more years of
having this inner sensibility repressed, it takes a
massive upheaval to allow the body to be free of the
repression and express itself once again. And very
few adults undergo such an upheaval. Even fewer
recover from its devastating effects. And of those
who do recover, how many can explain what went wrong
in the first place?
Without needing to say a word, Rhoda Kellogg's book
shows us figures produced by children from different
ethnic groups, living in different lands. We examine
these figures and we see that they are produced by
body movements without the children needing to be
copying from a physical object or model outside of
their own bodies. We also observe that these figures
are very simple as fits the very young age of the
artists. We also know that in each of these nations,
young children are educated in ways quite similar to
the ways we ourselves were educated. We know that the
mark of "good art," a "good memory," and a "good
mind"
is to mirror what is seen outside of our own bodies.
We don't yet witness the creation of a culture in
which education is "balanced" in the sense that both
kinds of art are equally valued, encouraged, and
rewarded with high marks.
However we do see from Rhoda Kellogg that this "other
art" does in fact exist. So I'm not just creating a
straw man or fake idea. And in fact I can stand
before you and show you the way I use art and
unrecorded body movement to get new ideas. My doodle
art, or abstract art, is just a record of my own body
movement.
Often before I start to write I take a pen and paper
and I doodle. I let my hands move freely with a pen
in each hand. Sometimes I just draw with one hand.
Among my writings I have thousands of examples of this
kind of art as an aid in my getting started on
writing. And as I write my arms and hands are moving
which helps me get more ideas. When I lie in bed and
let my mind rove, I may think of five things to say or
write in two hours. That's not very effective!
By examining the scribbles of Rhoda Kellogg's young
children subjects you can see that young children
begin their art by expressing thoughts and feelings
from inside their bodies. These thoughts and feelings
are non-verbal. The artistic lines young children
draw are traces of body movement. The body movement
is an expression of thoughts and feelings stirring
inside the young child, just as thoughts and feelings
are stirring inside of me as I'm scribbling and
doodling with a pen. I'm just a lot more
sophisticated in my use of this "other kind" of art.
I'm more sophisticated in this art because I've been
working on this subject now for about forty years.
I have had to develop this "other kind" of art to help
myself become more original after growing up socially
withdrawn, blocked, intimidated, and thwarted. This
blockage was due in part to my personal weakness and
lack of strong vigor. It also was due to certain
dominant personalities in my family and in the school
environment. However when I was young there was no
theory of this "other kind" of art, and there was no
balance in the educational system, so there was no
education aimed at helping a child learn to balance.
And a lot of my research is on this balancing of the
two sides of the body in movement and this balancing
of the inner sensibility with the outer sensibilities
which are emphasized in science as well as in art
itself.
9:30PM Friday, February 9, 2001
John L. Waters
johnlwaters@yahoo.com
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