perfect size box?

[Gill]

A very young child would probably not recognise the stick man as representing a man because that child won't have yet learned how easy symbols can make our lives. It's as we grow older that we look for short cuts and learn the value of symbols. In fact, we come to depend on them so heavily that we sometimes perceive the world around us in terms of symbols even when those symbols don't depict reality accurately.

If you look at a very young child's drawing, it is often better composed than drawings by older children. That child may not have the hand-eye co-ordination to produce something truly impressive, but the elements in the drawing will have better proportions and be less stylised than the drawings of older children. Young children try to draw what they see rather than what they have learned to see.

Gill

 

[StevieB]

I agree there - I dont think young children will recognise a stick man. Young children tend to draw humans to a very strict hierarchy depending on their development (indeed one of the developmental checks is the drawing of a human). They tend to start with a head that has arms and legs, as they develop a round body gets added, then hands and feet and finally facial features such as eyebrows ears and teeth. Children do not tend to draw stick men as a symbol of a human at all. That is why I wondered if they were using a symbol as a self taught shortcut or rather were exposed to the idea of a stickman from an outside influence and adopted it as a visual shortcut. I favour the second, adaptive response rather than the former innate response.

What this means is that pattern recognition can be taught, and that one can 'learn' to appreciate a form, or lack of it, as something to aspire to. As a consequence we all appreciate different forms of art / design / structure as a consequence of both our evolved preferences (symmetry = beauty outlined above) and our environmental exposure. After all if we all liked the same thing we would all be churning out identical pieces and complementing each other on the conformity of our designs!

What was this thread started on again...

Steve

 

[Nick W]

A good example is music. Mozart is generally considered to be a genius, unsurpassable for his musical talents. Much of his music is melodic, underscored by a regular tempo and just sounds 'right'.

Interseting choice of example there, which I think illustrates what is learned quite well. To his contemporaries quite a lot of what Mozart did was new, and extraordinary, rule breaking even; but because we have all heard it so much we can indeed predict what is going to happen remarkably well, even in a piece of his that we may have not have heard before.

As a singer, when working on music by a composer that I have not come across before, I have to work quite hard to read the music and get it right initially. (Luckily I am, as a Japanese applicant to one of our summer schools once said, very good at sightseeing.) After a while though, I get used to the idiom, and can start to predict what is going to happen, I have learned that composer's language.

The same happens with the graphic arts, the more you look at Pollocks, the more you get to understand the language, and the more you can begin to say, ah yes, I see.

This is not to pooh-pooh the idea that there is an inherent sense of good taste as well. I'm just not sure of which is dominant - if either.