Kalyaki-malaki

Analysis of children’s drawing Lessons by Elena Makarova

The child pokes a lead into a white sheet, puts a dot, a squiggle, closes the lines in circles or ovals. Ask him what it is and he will tell you whole stories.
“He speaks well, but he doesn’t know how to draw,” the parents lament, “it’s time to get down to it. This is a house with a chimney – here is a large square, there are windows in it, two small squares, and a triangle on top. A modern city child does not see such houses, but drawing them is easy and pleasant. This is how stereotypes are born, which are difficult to get rid of. In those first drawings, misunderstood by adults, children created their own sign system with the help of kalyak-malyak. We invaded the process without knowing the ABCs of children’s pictorial language.
Each child has his own doodles, his own set of elements, the construction of the composition, etc. Let’s take, for example, a circle. The repeated repetition of this element testifies both to obsession and the desire to bring everything into one, to collect into a whole; many circles – this is a whole system of closed worlds. Sharp lines can express aggressiveness, impatience, and loneliness… Kandinsky and Klee wrote about the symbolic meaning of elementary forms in art at the beginning of the 20th century. After going through figurative art, they returned to the “line and dot” and, by conjugation of these simple forms, created their own universe.
Artists returned to the childhood of civilization. They turned to the symbolic language of ancient rock carvings. From them – to children’s drawings. At the beginning of the 20th century, multi-volume studies were devoted to the analysis of children’s creativity. Artists have fallen into childhood in the truest sense of the word. They began to play cubes and pyramids. This is how modern cities, skyscrapers, moon rovers and other delights of civilization arose.
Children comprehend the structure of the world with the help of symbols. We are in a hurry to teach them the superficial depiction of real objects, take them away from their own tasks and, as a result, do not let them live through the most important phase of childhood.
Drawing, children tend to fill the entire space of the sheet, because the drawing is the whole world. As a rule, they define the bottom (earth) and the top (heaven) and everything they have to say is placed within these limits. But in each group there will definitely be two or three children for whom boundaries do not exist. They twist the sheet in all directions and draw from any arbitrary point.
“Is nature conceived by melody or by movement? – the five-year-old girl asked herself and answered: – Of course, both in melody and in movement. The world is one. So, everything should be in it at once.
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