Ways of talking about drawing practices. Sociocultural views: Gombrich and visually controlled drawing

Nina Scott Frisch

doi:10.7577/formakademisk.199

Abstract

In this article, I explore how part of the culture historian professor Ernst Gombrich’s vocabulary can be used in two examples of today’s drawing processes among children (age 9–12). His terms are related to their possible theoretical origin and placed in sociocultural understandings of human activity—and contrasted with other possible useful terms in a drawing-teaching context. How terms can encourage various teaching practices is then discussed.

Highlights

The words we use are very often part of concepts, or ways of thinking, that lead to various practices
So what is gained by reflecting on various ways of talking about drawing practices? Gombrich’s terms can be interpreted as echoing his time with an influence from Piaget, and as part of understandings found in art history and the field of linguistics
If we go back to the similarities between Lowenfeld’s and Piaget’s stages of development as outlined in the introduction, the answer can be that good terms will make us see, but perhaps more importantly, they will make us understand drawing processes related to the arena of teaching and learning drawing in new or different ways because they are placed in explanatory theoretical models of education

Summary

Introduction

The words we use are very often part of concepts, or ways of thinking, that lead to various practices. This is why social-constructivists (see for example Cunliffe, 1998) have understood and found an echo of this paradigm in Gombrich’s way of seeing art as mediated artifacts developed by and available to a group of people, as a collective, social enterprise This brings us to a brief overview of Gombrich’s theory and his understanding of the terms formula, scheme/schema/schemata, correction, visual control, medieval art, and post-medieval art. I have presented the definitions and my understandings of the concepts of visual controlled drawing processes, drawing genres, and internalized observation (Frisch, 2010), and of formula, scheme/schema/schemata, correction, visual experience, and medieval and postmedieval art (Gombrich, 1960/1992a). Visual control is used to look at the image model or the demonstration on TV (Frisch, 2010)

Discussion

Conclusion