From Endpoints to Repertoires: Some New Conclusions about Drawing Development

Abstract

In trying to broaden our conception of language development, the sociolinguist Dell Hymes suggested that we imagine a child who had impeccable control of the grammar of his native language, but who lacked the ability to tune his speech to the demands of different audiences and situations. When he called his little grammarian a misfit and a monster, Hymes was arguing that children acquire not language, but languages-ways of using words in face-to-face conversations and long-distance communications, in arguments and songs, in writing and in speech, in poems and recipes. The caricature was meant originally to startle linguists out of their concern for grammar apart from situation, but it has deep implications for any form of symbolic development-number, gesture, and even drawing. Imagine someone looking through an apartment window at a large city spread out below, about to take up a pencil to render what he sees. Even as he lays down the first marks, he has to chose which of many visual languages he will claim. Suppose he decides to make a picture. He faces the question of choosing which geometry or drawing system(s) he will use to translate the way in which walls, stairs, and cornices project, recede, and occlude: will he create a flat pattern of facades, a deep space based on perspective, or a deliberately fractured multiview panorama such as occurs in cities painted by Futurists? But, after all, he may not make a picture-he could make a map of streets and landmarks or a diagram showing the flow of traffic. These genres can also record what he sees or intuits about the landscape. Or if, in the end, he elects to make an aesthetic image, he still must choose what kind of rendition he will give the image. Is it to be a clean stylization in the tradition of Charles Sheeler or a kind of expressive urban portrait like those Joseph Stella made of Brooklyn? Hypothetical as they are, this set of choices raises questions concerning a fundamental conception of the development and exercise of drawing skills. At the heart of this conception is the assumption that the development of drawing skills can-at least within a culture-be adequately under