Drawing and Painting: Children and Visual Representation

Author John Matthews questions inherited wisdom about children′s development in visual representation. The traditional approach describes children′s development in terms of supposed deficits in which children progress from "primitive" earlier stages to "superior" ones, until they arrive at an endpoint of "visual realism."

The author explains different models of development in visual expression. Instead of measuring children′s efforts against an adult paradigm, the new models identify the modes of representation used by children as consequences of children′s own intentions, motivations, and priorities.