The Genius Within by David Adam

Author:David Adam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

* On average, of course.

ELEVEN

The Little Girl Who Could Draw

When we returned from the holiday to France during which I followed Tom Simpson and cycled up Mont Ven-toux, I asked my five-and-a-half-year-old daughter to draw a man on a horse. Ten minutes later, she proudly presented this:

Now, obviously, I consider my daughter to be an artistic genius. But I will agree all of her talent perhaps doesn’t show itself here. In fact, as much as it pains me to admit it, the drawing is pretty average for a child of her age.

The scale is good – the rider’s head, body and leg are in the correct proportions – and while the reins are a little wayward, the overall impression is definitely man-on-a-horse-y. But if you wanted to be critical you might point out the legs of the horse are rather stuck on to its body, and the leg of the rider is a bit of a token effort. But then, that’s common with children’s drawings. They show what they know to be true, not what they see. The same principle explains how children draw square tables. They know there is a leg at each of the four corners, so they draw all four legs in place, as if the table top was transparent glass.

On the next page, there is another drawing of a man on a horse, done by another five-and-a-half-year-old girl. It’s a bit better. Actually, it’s a LOT better. It’s so good, in fact, most artists and child psychologists agree it should be impossible for a child of that age to draw. Indeed, the first people to see the picture insisted the girl could not have drawn it. But she did. Take a look.

The girl who drew this picture was called Nadia Chomyn. When Nadia’s mother first showed it and others her daughter had sketched to clinical psychologists in Nottingham in the early 1970s, the scientists assumed the mother was mistaken, or worse, trying to deceive them.

The detail, the perspective and the unusual head-on approach were all the signs of a far more mature mind than that of a five-year-old. Most strikingly – and this perhaps didn’t register with you at first – the image breaks the boundaries of the paper. That is unheard of for a young child. Much older children and many adults strive to make a picture fit the frame, even compressing features and squashing letters as they approach the margin, so the image does not bleed off the edge.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.