Children's Art 1: The scribble years

Those who have seen After Maeve or planetcreature.com, know that I am passionate about children's art. For example, at one of Maeve's early birthday parties I showed a retrospective of Maeve's drawings during the pre-represententational years (the various stages of scribbling, as per Rhoda Kellogg*), which absolutely no-one appreciated.
Children's drawing development in its early stages follows a fairly universal pattern which reflects the organisation of the human mind and pysche. Those 'in the know' talk of the formation of the first circle as a more pivotal, defining moment in the development of the child than the celebrated 'first steps'.
The circle progresses to a mandala (combinations of circle and square or cross), variations on a circle eg with radiations, like a sun, and then becomes humanoid. Here I am showing the first humanoid mandala which I ever saw of Maeve's. It appeared in the middle of 1996 while I worked half-time in a very busy and chaotic general emergency department; I took it to work and stared at it from time to time as a source of wonder, delight and 'order' amidst the carnage. You can, once you think about it, recognise three central ? facial features (2 eyes and a nose?), and 4 ?limb appendages.
It is essential to understand as a core principle that early childhood drawings do not represent what children see. They represent how they conceive of the world. (One could argue, as Goethe did, that even as adults 'we see what we know', and therefore children are actually drawing what they see, but they do not perceive the world in a photographic or an objective fashion organised around perspective etc). In the child's completely unicentric view of the world, pictorial output is defined almost solely by the meaning of something in their mind, and in the toddler and young child, the primary meaning-space is occupied by the face and the enfolding body of the primary care-giver. In a later portrait of which a detail is shown on the planetcreature site, one recognises the experience of a central being inhabiting the leg-space of the central care-giver (as I see it, the symbolic containment of the experience is drawn, not necessarily Robyn's or Frank's actual legs).
I guess one of my missions in life is to help adults (parents and otherwise) to try to comprehend the experience of the child's mind, so that they can avoid creating unnecessary damage, through ignorance rather than malice, at early stages, particularly when the memory structures of the child's mind are pre-verbal and therefore less able to be easily accessed and cognitively manipulated.
One of the best ways to try to enter a young child's experience of the world is to sit with them as they draw, and to try to experience their pictures in a symbolic way. Kellog (who collected about a million drawings from children around the world) was fascinated even by such aspects as the different ways in which young children orient their scribbles in relation to the paper border, and described 9 or so different layout styles, which must relate to very early, probably universal, mental constructions of space. I have been intrigued to discover resonances with these core layouts in the compositions of the Great Masters, and, for example, the photographs of Ansel Adams.
Experiencing children's drawing does not exactly mean understanding what they mean: this is impossible, imprudent, disrespectful, and patronising (!!!)- although the more often you enter a child's world as co-observer, the more closely one can begin to sense the world as they see it. That means it is important not to ask what something IS, or to say what you think something might represent. A young child is not drawing rationally, they are drawing out of their inner sense of being, with the delight of creation, of making their mark on the world. You could as well ask them what their spontaneous dance IS or means.
Experiencing just means watching without judging, and where possible without intrusion, and simply observing, immersing yourself in their style of drawing (exuberant, concentrated etc), use of space, attention to detail, joy in their own production etc.
If you must interact, the technique I have settled upon is to 'sing' the drawing with them: to retrace with my hand the lines they have drawn with the sort of energy and focus I saw them use in different areas, echoing this focus and emotional rhythm with mouth noises like blowing or clicking.
Children crave attention, but the best attention we can give them is the sense of being felt, being comprehended, without judgement. Channelling their productions can come later, and as for modelling, well we are doing that by our own behaviour every minute.
*Rhoda Kellogg, Analysing Children's Art Mayfield Publishing, 1970