RIAZ Rafee, an artist of varied interests, is associated with Actionaid as a consultant on children’s art. He, along with his team of artists, visit rural Pakistan in a bid to work with children in villages and impart basic art training to them. During such visits children are provided art materials, including drawing boards, colour pencils, papers and watercolour boxes. and it was one of these art workshops that Rafee recently conducted in Mithi, Juhi, Kachchu and Bela, rural backdrops of Pakistan where life survives at its minimal.
The whole art activity started early this year. Children below nine years of age were taken from regular and informal schools. At first, Rafee found them a little shy, but after seeing the team of professional artists demonstrate drawing and painting, the audience was enthusiastically drawn in it. Children were encouraged to produce paintings, drawings, posters, sketches and even paper cuttings as per their inclinations. At the end of the workshop some more material was left with the children and the team of artists left promising to return after a period of one month to see what the children had done in this period.
In areas like Juhi and Kachchu where the day revolves round fetching water from far-flung and limited sources, children find no interest in a class with a teacher, rod-in-hand, urging and edging them on to rote learning. They only recite poems or tables or passages from books without understanding what it means. When these children were provided with an opportunity to express themselves through colours and forms, evolving collective identity and options for teamwork, there was a marked shine in their eyes. Children picked up motifs from their own surroundings. Children from the Hindu majority of Mithi, portrayed objects related to their culture and religion.
Juhi is a victim of robberies and dacoities. As such, a six year old child, Bolla, from the area painted with watercolour a robber holding a pistol in hand to stop a passing vehicle. It was a symbol of his awareness of social conditions. A seven-and-half year old girl from Mithi painted her house against a green background. It was contrary to the reality of sand laden atmosphere. When asked, she said that her elders always said that whenever there was rain, Mithi becomes green. She employed her imagination in her painting.
Seven-year-old Geeta Bai from Mithi painted a remarkable female figure speaking a lot more than her age. It reminded one of paintings by Ahmed Zoay who worked his canvases in bight blues, red, green and yellow. Geeta’s work was a perfect example of painting human form by children in any part of the world.
The children’s art, thus produced and displayed, at a local hotel on the occasion proved that given the means and opportunity all children will express themselves through line and colour or will shape any plastic material that they can lay their hands on.
This disposition, which develops into an attempt to represent objects, will persist until adolescence. So far as we can tell, this has been true of children in every age, both in primitive and advanced societies. Moreover it would seem that the stylistic development of the child up to the age of 10 or thereabouts has remained constant. Thus a battle scene painted by Horace Vernet in 1798, when the artist was 11-years old, is very much like the work of any fairly gifted child of our own day and has little connection with the aesthetic climate of the late 18th century. Unfortunately nobody ever cared to preserve works of art executed by children.
Now that Actionaid has taken upon itself to encourage children of remote areas with no means, it should think of producing a book on children art so that their works remain as a reference for future.
Through his experience at the workshops conducted for children, Rafee observes that a child in its second year, or even earlier, if given a pencil, will produce a mark, usually an irregular circle repeated again and again, and if given two pencils it will readily produce two simultaneous scribbles. By the third or fourth year recognizable images will have been produced. These commonly take the forms of heads with eyes, noses, mouth and two dependent trailers, which serve both to suggest a body and to indicate legs.
Arms, often produced from the sides of the head and furnished with a few fingers, rather in the manner of a lightening conductor or a toasting fork, are soon added. Geeta’s painting stands very close to this description.
Within the next three or four years the child obtains a stock of schematized forms, to be used and discarded with the growth of perception, representing houses, animals, celestial bodies, trees and vehicles; from these pictures may be constructed. Objects will usually be represented in one fixed manner. There will be very little attempt to situate them in space or to suggest any form of movement. Thus the human form, although it will be represented with greater care and attention than hitherto, will remain directly facing the spectator, whatever its supposed action, while its feet, as in Egyptian sculpture, will be seen in profile. The child is concerned to make a recognizable image and the foreshortened image is too recognizable for its purpose. It is moreover concerned with the representation of facts other than those, which its eyes can perceive. The child tries to show as much content of a thing as possible.
In children a readiness to play with colour coexists with the desire to scribble. Areas will be coloured and recoloured at first with what looks like a purely decorative intention. But with the formation of a pictorial language colours no less than forms require symbolic properties. Thus water is blue and may remain so even when it is springing from a fountain. One finds a quasi-symbolical use of forms. Two holes or tow blobs serve as eyes, a series of sausage shapes applied to the head may represent hair.
The pellucid integrity of the work of young children, the complete absence of stylistic ostentation or calculated effects is the admirable qualities, which the child keeps losing with growth in age. James Sully and Herbert Spencer saw children’s art as something of intrinsic merit in its own right rather than as an attempt at adult art. A great many modern artists, such as Klee, Picasso, and Chagall, have clearly been deeply influenced by the conceptual approach of children.
In Pakistan Qudus Mirza, Tabinda Chinoy and Zebun Zuby have worked on the same methodology. The extreme certainty of the work of the five-year old, the sensuous and the uninhibited use of colour and the vivacity of expression, have aroused an admiration. The art of children is not a vehicle for the greatest expression of the human mind, but within its limits it offers a rare perfection of feeling and expression.
RIAZ Rafee, an artist of varied interests, is associated with Actionaid as a consultant on children’s art. He, along with his team of artists, visit rural Pakistan in a bid to work with children in villages and impart basic art training to them. During such visits children are provided art materials, including drawing boards, colour pencils, papers and watercolour boxes. and it was one of these art workshops that Rafee recently conducted in Mithi, Juhi, Kachchu and Bela, rural backdrops of Pakistan where life survives at its minimal.
