When I met Brandy Agerbeck, a graphic facilitator and teacher, we talked about what it was like to encourage adults to get back to drawing. She told me about how she often heard stories from her adult students about the exact, precise moment from their childhood when someone—usually a grownup—had told them that they couldn't draw.
Meanwhile, Sunni Brown's TED talk that promotes doodling includes a chart of what kids draw as they grow older. First come scribbles, later come people, and in between are all kinds of variations.
The first time I watched Brown's talk, I remember being surprised to see one of the stages in particular. To me, the figure reads clearly as a person, with a head, body, arms, and legs. The arms, however, are coming out of the belly button instead of the shoulders.
A friend of mine made drawings just like that when she was a kid, and she told me about them while we were both in junior high. She also told me about how those belly button arms drove her mom nuts. Her mom would try to point out that arms attach to the top of the body, but the young version of my friend couldn't get it. She remembered that frustration years later—it was her story of how she stopped drawing.
I found myself thinking of these moments this week as I listened to comic artist Lynda Barry tell her fellow comic artist and former student, Nicole Georges, about finding freedom in drawing with four year olds.
Barry, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, pairs her graduate students with preschoolers. She tells them to work with the kids as co-researchers, for two and a half hours every Monday morning. If they're doing it correctly, the grad students will never let their head be higher than their four year old partner's, and the two of them will mirror each others' work and process, right down to what they're doing with their nondominant hands.
"If you can just stand to see what your hand is trying to do, you can get some information that way that you couldn't get just by thinking," said Barry in the podcast episode, explaining the benefit of drawing like a kid. After she finishes her MacArthur Genius Grant-funded sabbatical, she wants to get back to researching why drawing as a kid is so different from drawing as an adult.
So many artists who I admire think about what it means to draw when we are children. All their observations encourage me: drawing is not so much something that we must learn, as it is something that we can remember.
Mentioned in this issue: Brandy Agerbeck, loosetooth.com; "Doodlers, unite!" TED Talk by Sunni Brown; "Episode #177-Lynda Barry!!!" of Sagittarian Matters by Nicole Georges.