Does Practice Make Perfect? Children’s and Adults’ Constructions of Graphic Merit and Development: A Crosscultural Study
David Pariser, Concordia University
Anna Kindler, University of British Columbia.
Axel van den Berg, McGill University
Belidson Dias, University of Brasilia
Wan Chen Liu, National Changhua University of Education
" This paper touches on many topics related to child art, but primarily addresses two: the “real nature” of graphic development as it exists in some absolute sense, and various people’s notions of what they believe graphic development actually looks like. This abstract entity—the “true” nature of graphic development––is present mostly as an absence, but its presence is nevertheless felt, for it is a foil against which to measure the quantified judgments of judges from three different countries of what constitute better and worse drawings. And as these drawings have been collected from a cross-age sample of children, adolescents, naïve, and art trained adults alike, it is an easy step to organize these judgments of good, bad, and indifferent drawings into the implied outlines of a graphic-developmental path, one where the ultimate telos is a mystical and perhaps unknowable entity called a “good drawing.”
