February 6, 1998

The lanky creature four-year old Heather created with a green felt pen is no ordinary stick figure. "It's my dad," she declares.

And as far as her dad, Guy Mallabone, is concerned, it's the best depiction of himself he's ever seen. "I think it's fantastic," he laughs.

Such whole-hearted appreciation for children's art isn't reserved for parents. Anthropologists, doctors, psychologists and forensic specialists have long been interested in what children's pictures say. "Along with other data, children's drawings can be used as measures of intellectual growth, emotional maturity and mental well-being," says Dr. Marlene Cox-Bishop, associate professor of human ecology.

Pablo Picasso, Mandolin and Guitar, 1924

"Kids often emphasize the parts that are most important to them in communicating," she notes. A child who loves to pick apples may depict a figure with exaggerated fingers or the child of an aloof mother may draw her without arms.

After collecting the artwork of more than a thousand children from around the world, Cox-Bishop knows children's pictures transcend language and cultural barriers. "We learn to communicate through drawing long before we can read or write about our ideas and our response to the world," she says.

Hungarian Boy, age 14, Footbal Match

In a cross-cultural study, Cox-Bishop compared Inuit children's drawings with those of American mid-western children. Item by item she examined the drawings of each child, noting technique, line quality, use of color and space-and tried to statistically determine any gender differences. What she found surprised her: there were very few differences. A child's art is reflective of his or her culture, she says, and maybe each of the children had been similarly influenced by satellite television, common text-books and teachers educated in a southern culture.

Polish Girl, age 7, Cycling

What surprised her more, however, was discovering that no matter where children live, their visual consciousness develops at the same rate. "All kids learn to draw, learn to represent the world at about the same stages, which is incredible. Although the cultural information such as specific games, costumes and houses may change, generally how kids organize space, forms, stick figures, or Mr. Potato Heads -- happens at about the same age everywhere. It blew me away."

Developing visual literacy is important, Cox-Bishop says, because 80 per cent of the messages that bombard us are visual, not written. "Visual literacy is the ability to read the images, the visual environment," she says, and children have it naturally, if briefly. "We lose those skills. They atrophy."

The ability to represent the world visually comes from the intuitive, emotional, right hemisphere of the brain, she says. Our culture emphasizes the more logical, linear, left hemisphere. In the process, we squelch a child's creativity. "We pin their notion of whether they're successful on good grades in science and math and forget about the kid who could write a poem that would knock your socks off, or paint a picture -- what about those kids and that part of the brain?"

That part of the brain may help children find creative solutions to problems. "If they have to solve a problem that might represent deep space or multiple points of view, they just invent a solution. I just love how naive and innocent they are."

Renowned artists have had the same appreciation. "Picasso was known to have collected kids' art. He didn't collect it because he wanted to go back and copy the children's artistic solutions; he loved its spontaneity."

Ironically, that original and personal quality cherished in a child's drawing is often scorned in an adult's. "On one hand, we appreciate children's art because it's lovely and unsophisticated," Cox-Bishop notes, "then we judge a modern artist by the fact that his art doesn't appear to be sophisticated. When we say, 'ha! my six-year-old kid could do that,' we have forgotten something important. Perhaps that artist is yet a child, still has that child-like ability to look at the relationships of line and color and shape." What's more, she says, we forget that a child's drawing captures a wondrous and fleeting moment in time.

Heather's dad agrees. "Her pictures speak to where she was at this time in her life. They are so important. They tell me she's happy; they tell me she loves me."

How long will he keep Heather's latest artwork?

He smiles. "Forever."

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