![]() In a seminal study, Wilson and Wilson examined the drawings of American high school students and found that nearly all of their drawings were in some way imitative of other drawings, particularly comics and cartoons. This imitation alone does not suggest that drawings are as fully conventionalized as languages, but it does imply a tendency toward systematicity within and between artists.Įvidence for schematic graphic representations is not limited to a few artists within a culture. Not only were all three artists internally consistent with their own patterns, but the contemporary artists also clearly used the same schematic representations that Kirby used, in a sense validating his influence (at least in the small scale). Below Kirby’s drawings are examples of hands drawn by two other popular contemporary artists. The first row depicts consistent patterns used for drawing open hands and fists by Jack ‘King’ Kirby, who is regarded as one of the most influential artists in American comic history and is attributed with defining the aesthetic of superhero comics. Take, for example, the representations of hands in figure 2 by three comic artists. Unlike language, we consider it normal for people not to learn to draw and label those who do as ‘gifted’ or ‘talented’.Īdditionally, various artists use schematic representations in their drawings that combine to make larger novel forms, thus masking their systematic nature. If not surpassed, an individual’s drawing ability will remain the same throughout later life, with progress becoming significantly more difficult. Those that overcome this stagnation are believed to have either some innate talent for artistry or to have worked diligently to overcome it. This drop-off has been attributed to a lack of interest or motivation. From birth until puberty, children consistently improve in drawing ability, but they face a ‘period of oppression’ between ages 11 and 14, when their progression abruptly slows and stagnates. In contrast, drawing development has been viewed as the growth of an individualistic skill of which some are more or less proficient. ![]() Overall, this approach draws equivalence between drawing and the cognitive attributes of other domains of human expression. Such a drawing system is parallel to the resilient systems of language that appear when children are not exposed to a linguistic system within a critical developmental period. Without sufficient practice and exposure to an external system, a basic system persists despite arguably impoverished developmental conditions. Because drawings express concepts in the visual-graphic modality using patterned schemas stored in a graphic lexicon that combine using ‘syntactic’ rules, development thus requires acquiring a vocabulary of these schemas from the environment. Why do we consider drawing to be so different from language? This paper argues that the structure and development of drawing is indeed analogous to that of language. Yet, unlike language, we consider it normal for people not to learn to draw, and consider those who do to be exceptional. Just as language is a representational system that uses systematic sounds (or manual/bodily signs) to express concepts, drawing is a means of graphically expressing concepts. Both drawing and language are fundamental and unique to humans as a species.
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