The nature of children's art and methods of influence.
The child develops intensively for several years. It changes a lot during this time, and his work changes as well. Two baby pictures- or three-year are very different from the images of twelve- and thirteen. During this entire period, the child's painting expression may develop incorrectly and defectively, but this development can take place in a way consistent with the nature of the child and rightly in terms of painting.
Already in the first years of a child's life, drawing your naive "pictures", uses certain forms. These are initially straight lines or curves, strong or delicate, zigzags, dots, circles, triangles, rectangles etc. With these types of elements, the child expresses more and more clear images, representing reality. Individual image forms do not mature at the same time in all children. Some develop faster, slower in others, but basically they all follow the same development path from a more primitive and naive to a more mature form, i.e. more clearly and fully expressing the presented reality.
Intervention from the outside into the creator's world always carries a great danger. Foreign influences disturb the author's creative balance very easily, instead of progress and development, they cause inhibitions, and even degeneration of form. Images due to improper influences, along with the loss of authentic experience, they lose their suggestiveness. Instead of formal connections and solutions, usually appears barren, objective descriptiveness, sometimes even dead and trivialized. In the field of art, any intervention and help from the outside, if it is to give positive results, must be extremely discreet, sensitive to artistic sensitivities and very thoughtful.
We already mentioned, that the child sees vivid images in the imagination and wants to give them a concrete shape in the work. Therefore, he does not need to be encouraged to do this. Often this work is done in the form of play. But even then it is something important for the child, and even serious. It does not approach this task as entertainment, but he works with focus and concentration and always overcomes some difficulties, and thus it develops.
It is not advisable, that the pedagogue should leave the child to his own fate and watch his work passively. On this subject, as well as in others, there are undoubtedly bad ones, but also good teaching methods, and they must be clearly distinguished.
Therefore, the primary task of the pedagogue will be to create a favorable atmosphere for the development of the child's art and to make it resistant to various harmful external influences..
Kid, as we already mentioned, he constantly looks at other people's pictures in his environment and remembers them, so he may start imitating them involuntarily. Therefore, the educator should first of all create an atmosphere, which rules out this tendency, i.e. encourage your child to believe in their own ability to express themselves. The child should be convinced, that even a less legible form and less consistent with reality is valuable mainly because of this, that she is her own. It will gladly accept this view and undertake independent work aimed at creative painting expression.
The curriculum and methods used should primarily take into account the age of the child. With the youngest children, we start work with a free and uninhibited drawing from the imagination, and between the year 10 i 14 we take a study from nature. Between these two extreme phases, the entire program must be set up logically. However, it should not be schematic or rigid, but like this, which can always be adapted to the individual development of the child, to his preferences and abilities. A rigid and schematic division into classes will always be dangerous here. It is not about any sort of ranking of topics, but about the development and deepening of the painterly content of the image, its expression in the form and operation of colors. Arranging the program in rigid and schematic compartments will make our work difficult, on the other hand, when we have exhausted one problem and become "saturated" with one way of working, we should immediately take up another in order to discover the different possibilities. This type of program requires long-term development, whose time will vary in different teams. The boundaries of these periods will always have to be sensed by the pedagogue. Relapses and repetitions of even well-successful studies in order to deepen them are inevitable.
Throughout the history of painting, a small number of the same themes are constantly repeated, and yet each epoch and each individuality brings new perspectives and new statements. So it is indifferent, whether we set the subject of the dog first in the program, then goat theme, or vice versa, but it is not indifferent, how we will develop both themes. The child begins his work at an early age with the most difficult topic, because of man, because he knows the subject best. Still life is considered an easier subject, and that's what we'll be dealing with at the end.
It seems very difficult to set up a detailed curriculum in this subject, where there are so many relative values. How to set up some rational program, since a child on the lowest step draws and paints "perfectly" in his own way. The important thing is to arouse interest, love, but of necessity we return to the same tasks, which in good conditions mature and grow thanks to the child's inventiveness.
At the lowest level of education, the child's work should be treated with great freedom. During the production of the painting, the child often resigns from the first concept and changes it, and even changes the subject and content of the image. He is looking for solutions, but if a random form arises in the image, the child picks it up and uses it during further work. The educator should know about this and not embarrass the child, rather, allow him to take advantage of happy accidents.
Therefore, at lower levels of education, the topic should not be narrowed down, but rather treat it with great understanding.