Artistic expression: The development of representational strategies in children's drawings

Abstract

Theories of artistic development must take account of the specific interaction between artistic expression and cognitive development. This study is designed to investigate the development of expressivity in childrens' and adolescents' drawings, color choice, and judgment of expressive drawing, in order to reexamine some contemporary cognitive and artistic developmental theories. Elements such as lines, forms, colors can be seen in their drawings and the ways in which these elements are presented may change as children grow. Ives (1984) suggests that children use the representational strategies of literal expression, abstract expression, and content expression to depict emotional qualities; Winston, Kenyon, Stewardson, and Lepine (1995) find that children like to use themes to make expressive qualities in their drawings. In the present study of eight age groups (ages four, five, six, seven, nine, eleven, fourteen, and sixteen), the representational strategies in the drawings of mood expression of a happy tree and a sad tree were established by three distinct tasks (drawing, color choice, and judgment task). The result suggests that age is a factor in the development of expressivities and the relation between stage and age may be best captured by Vygotsky's (1978) theory of the zone of proximal development. It also indicates that social interaction is a factor in the development of the representational strategies and the development of artistic expression needs to be considered both in terms of universal and nonuniversal domains.