El Dibujo Infantil y Adulto

 

This article talks about the importance of drawing and how most people stop doing it when they grow up. 

One of the key ideas of the text is that drawing is not just to have fun and to get an asthetic outcome, but it is a language, a tool to express ourselves, can help us to solve problems, visualize our ideas... In other words, drawing is important for our daily lives as adults too because it stimulates our mind and can help us in different aspects.

One of the things that I found the most interesting about this article was  the reasons why we usually stop drawing because I extremely relate with both reasons. The first one is that we have still got a traditional education in the majority of schools in Spain and this education does not take into account the different intelligences that exist; they focus on the linguistic-verbal and the logical-mathematical, leaving all the others aside, such as the visual-spatial. This is something I have experienced because when I was young, in school we had very little time of art related subjects compared to the more theoretical and traditional ones. The same happened in High School and even worse because in 4th of ESO we could choose not to do these subjects anymore. So we can see that education, at least here in Spain, does not motivate students to draw and let their imagination run free, since it is not considered as important as the other subjects. As we have commented above, this is totally untrue and in fact, not promoting this can make people less creative in their future life and this makes them have a lack of an expression tool.

The other reason that was pointed out was the obsession we have about drawings being beautiful and asthetically pleasant. As we have this idea stuck on our brains, we tend to qualify drawings as good or bad regarding how beautiful they are from our point of view. This idea is extremely damaging because people who do not draw following the canon beauty patterns, end up giving up on drawing because they think they are bad at it. Also, this pushes the idea that having a beauty canon is good and that we have to stick to it otherwise, we are not going to fit in. This is extremely damaging in several different levels because it is pushing som asthetic expectatives that are almost unreachable for most of us. 

A quote I really liked was the one that says that no one stops writing because they have got bad handwriting or they are bad writers, so the same should apply to drawing. 

The last part of this article was a proposal of different activities we can do in order to improve our visual language competences and the one I found the most interesting was the graphic recording, which consist on take notes by combining drawing and writing. I thought this can be really challenging but at the same time, really useful because we remember better images rather than words.