Seeing and Knowing

Seeing and Knowing

As children grow older, they seem to want to capture, in their drawings, more information about the shapes and structures of objects which interest them. In doing this, they sometimes produce drawings which turn out odd-looking to some adults. This is because the drawings do not always show a possible view of an object. (See Figures 42, 43, 44 and 45.) Figure 42 (by Campbell, an Australian Singaporean aged four years and seven months) shows people sitting around a table. Why is the table drawn like this, as an approximate rectangle, with the figures grouped around top and bottom edges, making one figure ‘upside-down’, so to speak, from a viewer's point of view? Figure 43 shows another drawing of people ...