My son is four, and his little school is very good about sharing his creations with his family. The sharing thing didn’t go so smoothly in the beginning. Day after day, his father and I would walk past the cubby with the sheets of paper in it. We’d never done Pre-K life before. We didn’t know we were supposed to take them home. Sometime later, a kind teacher handed over the stack of loose pages.
It was then that we learned the awful truth. Our son thinks we are hideous. Or at least, that is how I felt the first time I saw one of the drawings. What did I expect? Certainly not the bald, misshapen stick figure with the twisted gaping mouth howling from the page. I expected to have hair and glasses, and maybe even a triangle skirt over my stick figure legs. Clearly, I know very little about Pre-K art. But I am not the only one. Many parents are taken aback by their children’s drawings, harmless as they are.
In her fascinating analysis of children’s drawings and what they might mean for understanding creativity, Isabel Fattal says, “While observers tend to agree that there’s a stage at which most children strive for realistic depiction in their drawing, many psychologists argue that at earlier stages of drawing, children aren’t thinking about realism. Take, for example, the way kids tend to scatter objects in awkward places in their drawings; they might draw a house on the left corner of the page and then a road that somehow stands above it. But that doesn’t mean they don’t understand how these scenes look in the real world, some experts say; instead, the child is more concerned about achieving a kind of visual balance between the objects. Their goal, ultimately, is to create something that’ll make sense to the person they show it to.”
For months now, my husband and I have been featuring in a series of family portraits that essentially look like this:
Three stick figures with no torsos, arms emerging from where their ears should be. Despite typically not having noses, they all smile the same smile. Perhaps they must breathe through their mouths. Terrifying as the images are, I am comforted by the thought that my son’s representation of himself always appears alongside, or between, us. I find it very moving.
Recently there have been some additions to the depictions. Not torsos, ears, or shoulders, no. He’s added his grandmother and a figure he calls his baby Pop Pop, who almost always looks like a tick.
Two weeks ago at school, the children were asked to draw a self-portrait while looking in a mirror. He was told to draw himself in his favorite outfit. This was the product of the exercise:
Interestingly, when asked to draw the clothing that would cover the torso that did not exist, he did not draw a torso. Instead, he made what would ordinarily be the face area, orange. His father and I are the apparitions on the left. My mother, his Baba, is the thin, green creature on the right. The insect at the bottom is, again, Pop Pop. It is noteworthy that in this universe, one has either a head or a chest.
Sometime after seeing the self-portrait, I was scrolling through images on my phone and found this:
Above is a self-portrait drawn by my nephew in 2019 when he was four years old. Upon further inquiry, my sister was able to supply me with another by her daughter, who is also four:
Tadpole Scholarship
Apparently, this is quite normal and they aren’t necessarily an accurate depiction of how children see other humans. Fattal argues that children don’t necessarily draw for the outcome. They are interested in the sensations of the process.
Fattal says, “For many kids, drawing is exhilarating not because of the final product it leads to, but because they can live completely in the world of their drawing for a few minutes (and then promptly forget about it a few minutes later). Adults may find it hard to relate to this sort of full-body, fleeting experience. But the opportunities for self-expression that drawing provides have important, even therapeutic, value for kids.”
The depictions themselves are known as tadpole people and interest in why and how children draw them constitutes an entire field of study. In 1993, Maureen Cox attempted to fill the theoretical gap with her book Children’s Drawings of the Human Figure. According to the book description, children’s early attempts at the human form are bizarre; “it appears to have no torso and its arms, if indeed it has any, are attached to its head.” Cox attempts to trace the development of the human form in children's drawings; she reviews the literature in the field, criticizes a number of major theories which purport to explain the developing child's drawing skills, and also presents new data.
In 2006, Cox and Parkin followed the evolution of six children’s drawings from pre-representational to a conventional stage of human figure drawing. They looked at spontaneous drawings and drawings from test sessions to check whether all children drew ‘tadpole’ forms before they produced conventional figures and whether the conventional figures were adapted from the tadpoles. Four of the six did produce “tadpole forms,” but given the wide individual differences in the transition from one form to the next, there wasn’t clear evidence that the conventional figure had been adapted from the tadpole form.
More recently, researchers have become interested in the effect of cultural variations in tadpole people. A 2015 study by Gernhardt et al. considered tadpole drawings from 183 children from seven cultural groups. The results of their study suggest “that children from all cultural groups realized the body-proportion effect in the self-drawings, indicating universal production principles. However, children differed in single drawing characteristics, depending on the specific ecosocial context. Children from Western and non-Western urban educated contexts drew themselves rather tall, with many facial features, and preferred smiling facial expressions, while children from rural traditional contexts depicted themselves significantly smaller, with fewer facial details, and neutral facial expressions.”
Tadpole People in Art
Some prominent artists have even mimicked the form. Austrian artist Oswald Tschirtner’s work often contained headfooters. Tschirtner was born in 1920 and entered the seminary at age ten. He was drafted into the German army and spent time as a POW in France. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1946 and remained under care for some time. He was admitted to the House of Artists in 1981. His head footers look very much like a stacked series of elongated Polynesian Moai.
The Outsider Art Fair describes them as “an increasingly minimal way of notating the human figure in which anatomy is reduced to a head perched on spindly, attenuated legs. His mode of reducing the visible world to graphic shorthand can be seen in his renderings of objects and landscapes, an activity that for the artist was not unlike the act of translation. Scholars have identified his minimal sensibility as an aptly ascetical manifestation of his quiet, humble spirituality.”
Hieronymus Bosch’s "The Last Judgment" features gryllos that are quite similar. According to the Hermitary website, “the creatures depicted in church art as gryllos (half human, half fantastic animal) and the hybrid monsters of Bosch’s semi-religious paintings are projections of the psychology of a dying culture, a culture riddled with fear and madness.” Bosch’s gryllos, while they too are merely a head and legs, sometimes have animal parts. It's an interesting comparison nonetheless.
When I told my son that I was writing about his artwork, he offered to do an original piece. As unflattering as they are, I’m very proud of his willingness to express himself and to share his vulnerability with us all. I’ve come to appreciate the tadpole people and I know that one day, when they are gone, I will miss them.
Nice and interesting article ! I like the four year olds art more though.