The Fantasy Embeddedness of Girls' Horse Drawings

National Art Education Association

The Fantasy Embeddedness of Girls' Horse DrawingsAuthor(s): Paul DuncumSource: Art Education, Vol. 38, No. 6 (Nov., 1985), pp. 42-46Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192878 .

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In this article ... Duncum analyzes the common phenomena of children's horse-,

drawings. "The construction of

meaning in children's drawing frequently remains

as much in the child's mind as it is

graphically expressed, we need to develop an appreciation for children's fantasy

worlds and the ways these worlds

both mirror and transform their lives."

The Fantasy

Embeddedness Of Girls'

Horse Drawings

Paul Duncum

C hildren's drawings are frequently a part of rich worlds of fantasy, worlds as important to children as

their drawings (Wilson & Wilson, 1982). It has not always been recog- nized as so. R. R. Tomlinson, the influential English art educator writing an introduction to a collection of children's drawings published in 1936,

wrote, "Of the illustrations I have nothing to say, for children's drawings can and must speak for themselves." (p. 7).

In this paper, I will argue that of all the fallacies bequeathed to us by past art educators, the notion that the meaning of children's drawing is self- evident is one. I will argue that children's drawings "speak" only when fully acknowledging their embeddedness in children's fantasy worlds. The legacy of the self-evident, fantasy-free view is still with us. In par- ticular, younger children's images are

commonly regarded as so expressive, so aesthetically saturated, and as such self-evident examples of creativity that they require no explanation. Rhoda Kellogg (1969) approvingly quotes one child's comment, "This is not a story, it is a picture to look at" (p. 1).

Kellogg must have taken 'care to select her quote. The embeddedness of children's drawings in fantasy is easy to demonstrate. All one needs to do is gently probe children about their drawings. I recently asked several girls about their drawings of horses, a subject that has long been noted to have an

Art Education November 1985

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abiding fascination for girls. Many girls produce unsolicited horse drawings, sometimes prolifically, and sometimes well into adolescence. Many unsolicited drawings either hint at a fantasy dimension or mainfest it quite specifically, but for the sake of argu- ment I will focus on horse drawings because many provide, on first ac- quaintance, what seems to be a counter example to the idea of fantasy embeddedness. Horse drawings freqently contain nothing more than a horse, or a horse and rider, standing alone on otherwise blank paper. There is often nothing whatsoever to suggest that they have any significance for the girls who draw them other than the desire to make a pleasing picture or to attempt realism. But once girls are encouraged to talk about their drawings, a world of speculative fantasy emerges, a narrative world of which the drawings are merely the outward visual sign. The drawings emerge as only the visible tip, as it were, of an iceberg of fantasy. Figure 1 Katherine, an eight year old, told me that although she sometimes draws

horses "just for practice," she frequently draws with a story in mind. For example, to one drawing, ostensibly of a horse lifting a front leg and standing on an incline, she had attached the verbal label of "A Stray." She in- formed me that she often thinks of the horses she draws as "A Captive," "Free," or "A Stray," and of this par- ticular drawing she went on to say:

He's a stray because he's wild. He's not really wild - he was once captured and he got away, and now he's a stray. And he isn't being fed like he's used to. He's really trying to find his way home so he can be fed properly, because he doesn't know how to feed on grass, because he was captured very young and he doesn't know where to get his proper grass. He likes oats, and he hasn't got any oats and he hasn't got any hay. He's meant to be climbing up a hill.

Figure 2 Sophie, another eight year old, told me the following story about her drawing, ostensibly of one horse licking the face of another smaller horse,

I was just thinking of a horse. It was a very, very windy day - that's why the horse's mane is going that way, and its tail is flung up. And I was thinking of the exact horse, thinking of its shadings and patches... It's a Welsh Mountain Pony up in the hills and it's really windy, and it's just about to rain, and there's thunder and lightning, and the horses are just getting their babies together so that the foals don't get struck by lightning or stray off. She's trying to get the little baby to go with her because the baby's scared. She might have run to the back of it, except she didn't. She's licking the foal just for the love of licking. I was going to say that this was a grandma pony and it wasn't a windy day, and was just licking it, but I changed my mind.

If Sophie's drawing does not exactly speak for itself, her narrative speaks clearly of the flexibility of her imagination, and points to at least one reason why the fantasy-world dimension of children's drawings should be taken seriously. The fantasy-world that so frequently accompanies children's drawings is often so rich in speculation

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about and exploration of the world children are coming to master that they reveal more clearly than the drawings themselves their authors' preoccupa- tions, their hurts, fears, and delights. Another drawing by Sophie, which according to her depicts a girl that has just been thrown by her horse, recreates an incident experienced by Sophie the weekend before she drew the picture.

Sophie's eldest sister, now eighteen years old, remembers drawing horses when she; was Sophie's age. Like Sophie today, she would spend countless hours every week engrossed in producing images. She remembers that while her drawings must have seemed to everyone else to be straight- forward representation of horses, concerned with realism, for her they were always illustrations of self-generated narratives about "a mythical perfect horse. '

Of course children do make images merely to be looked at. Many older children draw from nature with the primary intention of mastering knowledge of a favoured subject by means of visual information. Sophie loves to draw while closely observing her pets, and she does so with re- markable skill. She also draws from how-to-draw books without, apparent- ly, any thought save that of mastering technical skill.

While girls fantasize as they draw domestic subjects, fairy princesses and animals, boys fantasize while they draw cars, trucks, machines, monsters, battle scenes, scenes of violence and daredevilry (Wilson & Wilson, 1982). Often these drawings are produced in idle moments on scraps of paper which are soon discarded. It is often difficult for anyone other than the child to find any thread connecting them together. Even when children draw prolifically, scattering their images across one page after another, there are often few clues as to the narrative nature of these drawings (Wilson & Wilson, 1979). They frequently lack the usual linking sequences between events that we associate with narrative, by which the narrative can be read. What emerges from discussing these drawings with children, however, is that far from being separate, discrete images, they are frequently related by virtue of being part of a single story. The linking sequences are left out because the children are in a hurry to realize the

central aspects of their fantasy, often in fact to find out for themselves how everything turns out. This further sug- gests that we need to completely revise our ways of reading children's drawings. We need to refocus our attention, to consider children's drawings not as an isolated, art-like phenomenon, but to see them in the context of the lives children lead in our culture, to see them, as Raymond Williams (1977) says of all cultural products, as con- stitutive of lived experience. We need to become sensitive to what is left out of children's drawings just as much as to what is put in.

The fact that the fantasy embeddedness of children's drawing is frequently difficult to decipher does not mean that art educators have not acknowledged it, though usually they have either dismissed it as unimportant or vigorously tried to combat it. Ken- neth Clark, for example, wrote of another influential English art educator, Marion Richardson,

Although she did much to develop the children's imagination she always discouraged the feeble fantasies, the shallow day dream pictures into which children so easily subside. (Richardson, 1948, p. 9)

As Richardson (1948) put it herself, she was solely concerned with "visual experience through the eyes," (p. 71) and she informs us that "A picture is something seen, not thought about" (p. 71).

This emphasis on manifest content has led to a preoccupation with the development of children's purely graphic devices: in the literature of art education there are numerous develop- mental studies of this kind. This preoccupation is amply illustrated by the longitudinal study of one girl's horse drawings documented by Sylvia Fein (1976) in her book Heidi's Horse. Fein carefully records Heidi's drawings over a period of fifteen years, from the age of two until seventeen. Her commen- tary is excellent in tracing the girl's step-by-step visual problem solving, but she completely overlooks the evidence of Heidi's fantasy world which is presented in the drawings themselves. Fein hardly acknowledges its existence.

Admittedly, many of Heidi's draw-

ings contain not the slightest evidence for any meaning other than what is actually pictured. Many of her drawings consist simply of a horse, standing or grazing, running or jumping. How- ever, if one has talked to other girls about their horse drawings and has learned to read them in the context of their lives, it is possible to see in many of Heidi's other images, evidence that their meaning is incompletely visual- ized, that they are merely indications, albeit often spare, of a rich world of imaginative exploration. Many of the drawings have attached verbal labels indicating ideas that are not manifest in the images themselves. One large drawing of a horse eating hay unhesi- tatingly shows the animal defecating, or as Fein rather coyly puts it, Heidi "depicts his entire digestive cycle." (pp. 48, 49). A further drawing (p. 76) consists of a large horse designated "King" approaching another smaller horse who is tied to a tree and designated "His mare." Heidi has even composed a visual narrative about a horse who spent all his time under a tree. Two girls decide to ride him to a store, but when he arrives there he im- mediately gallops home leaving the girls behind (p. 101). It is a simple tale, and given the kinds of stories that other girls devise about the simplest drawings of horses, one can only sup- pose that Heidi's drawings of Indians and cowboys are associated for her with more exciting dramas. It is a great pity that the preoccupation with manifest graphic content among art educators led Fein away from checking this possibility. Who knows what fantasy worlds she might have unearthed beneath Heidi's horses if she had been looking.

Yet we might well ask what significance drawing horses and devising fantasies associated with horses has to play in the life of young girls. Accord- ing to psychoanalysts, children engage in fantasy as a way of externalizing un- pleasant experiences so that such un- pleasantness can be assimilated piecemeal (Ellis, 1975). They argue that children engage imaginative play in order to learn ways of overcoming their fears and anxieties that might be usefully employed in the real world. According to this view, children draw as a way of materially realizing their fears, to make them more real, and so more easily negotiated. It has also been

Art Education November 1985 44



suggested that children fantasize as compensation for their inability to emulate adults and as a way of main- taining the desire to strive for com- petence (Bettelheim, 1975). In fact such a basically negative view is not always warranted, and it often seems just as appropriate to regard children's drawings as an attempt to find out in a playful, non-critical mode, who they are now, who they would like to be, what they desire of the future.

Now it is always hazardous to suggest what specific meaning something might have for someone else, and no less so to suggest what significance drawing horses might have for young girls. The traditional symbolism of the horse is particularly complex, and not well defined (Circlot, 1967). However, generally speaking, horses have tradi- tionally been used as symbols of in- tense desires and instincts, and they have often been credited with a magical

nature. My own observations suggest that girls are fascinated by horses for a number of reasons. They seem at- tracted by the animal's power, its vigor, its forceful beauty, and while riding, a sense of mastering such power. They also seem engaged with caring for the animal, of mastering such power by tending to it in a mater- nal way. Finally, horses, like all animals, offer the opportunity of observing the process of reproduction which fascinates us all, but particularly children. As Howard Gardner (1973) has noted in his extensive study of children's artistic growth, children have a "perennial interest" in birth, animals, and reproduction (p. 266).

But what does all this mean for art educators? If, as I have argued, the construction of meaning in children's drawing frequently remains as much in the child's mind as it is graphically expressed, we need to develop an ap-

preciation for children's fantasy worlds and the ways these worlds both mirror and transform their lives. We need to realize that what children do not picture may often play as important a role in their lives, if not a more important role, than the subjects they do picture. Only in this way will we ever come to terms with the full range of meanings with which children commonly invest their drawings, to understand their drawings as they do. As David Sless (1981) has recently argued, no picture can be read as if its meaning was self-evident. If we want to understand the motive behind an image as opposed to inferring the motive, we must as a matter of basic methodology, investigate the conditions under which the image was produced, independently of the image.

Adopting this position means that we need to read children's drawings in the context of the children's lives. For


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example, Ricnardson's Art and the Child (1948) contains a collection of children's images that illustrate, presumably, what she thought children's picture-making should be like. Many of these images bear striking resemblance to Cezanne and various School of Paris painters, all of whom were notable chiefly for their painterly and expressive qualities rather than their iconography. Indeed the tendency to examine children's drawing as if it were art has not only been in itself in- appropriate, but has also involved a parsimonious modernism. Perhaps the most impudent example is that of Alschuler and Hattwich (1947). They asserted that the nonrepresentational scribbling of very young children was more expressive than even children's earliest representational drawings, that they revealed more of the child's personality. Yet how could they possibly tell? Clearly, they were regarding children's drawing in the light of what was for them late in the 1940s the newest and most exciting modern art style, American Abstract Expres- sionism, not in terms of children's evolving abilities' to express their developing mastery of the world. David Ecker (1973) has even suggested that we need to develop a develop- mental description of children's talk about their drawings to parallel and complement the numerous classifica- tions of their graphic development. As Howard Gardner (1973) has observed, millions of children's drawings have been collected, but very few systematic notes on children's comments. While he cautions that children's intuitions about their motives may not be fully articulate, he believes that verbal ques- tioning can be revealing.

Diana Korzenik (1976) adds support to this view by claiming that in coming to understand what problems a child may be trying to solve in a drawing, the evidence of the drawing may be in- complete. The drawing, she claims, may only be evidence for what a child believes picturing can or should ac- complish and hence only a clue as to a child's goal. To understand this, she says, we need to ask them.

One of the few systematic attempts in this direction comes from Claire Golomb's (1974) research on the drawings and three dimensional playdough models of children from two to six years. As Rudolf Arnheim wrote about

her work,

The vexing problem of what the child actually sees in, and intends by, the spare shapes he draws and models is greatly clarified by what we learn about the child's own spontaneous comments. (Golomb, 1974, 10. XVIII)

Golomb discovered the development of a number of qualitatively different kinds of talk of fantasies associated with their images during these early years. We now need to focus our attention on the far more diverse and culturally significant images of middle childhood children. But the first step is simply to become aware of the playful- ly imaginative worlds which are frequently "submerged" beneath children's drawing, to begin to see that often a child's drawing is the merest tip of an iceberg of fantasy.

This acknowledgement should in- evitably lead to a recognition that children are greatly in need of training in how to picture their currently unpic- tured fantasies. At present, when so many teachers spend the art lesson on marginal craft skills, children are forced to rely on whatever drawing skills they can pick up outside the classroom. A major reason why only fragments of children's fantasy worlds are pictured is surely related to the lack of formal visual skills training in schools. If teachers took a more asser- tive approach to drawing skills, children would be able to realize their fantasies in a more concrete way. It might then be said that the justification that we as art teachers frequently give for our subject, the playful, self- expression of each child, would have more substance than it currently does. We cannot continue to talk of self- expression in art while, because we fail to teach appropriate drawing skills, nine tenths of a child's imaginative world is submerged. U

Paul Duncum is a graduate student and tutor of visual arts at The Flinders University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia.

References Alschuler, R. H., and Hattwick, L. B. (1947).

Painting and personality. Chicago, IL: Universi- ty of Chicago Press.

Bettelheim, B. (1975). The uses of enchant- ment. London: Thames and Hudson.

Circlot, J. E. (1967). A dictionary of symbols. (Trans. J. Sage). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Clark, K. (1948). In M. Richardson. Art and the child. London: University of London Press.

Ecker, D. (1973 January). Analyzing children's talk about art. The Journal of Aesthetic Education. 7 (1), 58-73.

Ellis, M. J. (1973). Why people play. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Fein, S. (1976). Heidi's horse. Pleasant Hill, CA: Exelrod Press.

Gardner, H. (1973). The arts and human development. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Golomb, C. (1974). Young children's sculpture and drawing. Cambridge, MS: Har- vard University Press.

Kellogg, R. (1969). Analyzing children's art. Palo Alto, CA: National Press Books.

Korzenik, D. (1976). Creativity: Producing solutions to a problem. Studies In Art Educa- tion. 17 (2), 29-35.

Richardson, M. (1948). Art and the child. London: University of London Press.

Sless, D. (1973). Learning and visual com- munication. London: Croom Helm.

Tomlinson, R. R. (1936). Forward In W. Viola. Child art and Franz Cizek. Vienna: Austrian Junior Red Cross.

Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wilson, B., and Wilson, M. (1979 April). Children's story drawings: Reinventing worlds. School Arts, 78 (8), 6-11.

Wilson, M., and Wilson, B. (1982). Teaching children to draw: A guide for teachers and parents. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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The Fantasy Embeddedness of Girls' Horse Drawings