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Now that Rae is back from swim practice, I sit the girls down to make a

piece of art together with all the same materials at their disposal.
Paige: *Indicating the watercolor palette she used* I mixed all the
colors!
Rae: Why would you do that? Now I cant have a yellow, now I cant
have a red
They decide on the big white paper and discuss ideas for what to draw.
Paige says Lets do a Carnival! and Rae says no. But when Paige suggests
they make a dot rainbow, Rae begrudgingly agrees as long as she can make
the rainbow. Paige can do the outline, she says.
This is how most of the activity unfolds. The girls artistic style and
aesthetic taste remain true but are actually made more evident when
working together. Paige makes the grass out of the dotting tool- Rae correct
her mistakes with a brush of her own. Paige makes a green sun- Rae
paints over it yellow. Rae decides there has to be a heart underneath the
rainbow; Paige colors it in so it has all the colors in it.

Many boundaries are

set by Rae and broken down by Paige; as she did in her individual art
practice, Rae has an image of what the art is supposed to look like and Paige
just wanted to have fun with the materials. According to Paige, [Rae]
doesnt like to use her imagination, but I like to. Whether this is the case or
not, the end result is a wonderfully mixed painting that displays how each
girl sees and creates art. It is clear having seen both of their final results

individually where Rae and Paige


influenced the painting.

In reflection, although Rae often


set the rules for how the painting was
supposed to go, Paige was the one who set the tone for how the results went
because the decisions she made often set the direction the painting would
end up. It was in this study that the two girls artistic selves came out most
prominently (Walsh 1999). Rae was sure that working alone was most fun
because she got to come up with her own ideas without them being messed
up. To Paige, both were fun because she got to create something new.
ANALYSIS
The first thing that was made clear through this study was that the
drawing programs both Rae and Paige possessed were very similar. As two
children who have been raised together in the same culture and in the same
school, their relationship with art has been predominantly the same. The
conventions that they have picked up about art, therefore, do not differ
despite their age difference. Both execute a program for drawing a house as
Brent Wilson prescribes- with a deliberate program in mind, drawing first the

frame and roof and then the door and windows (Wilson 1977). The images
are practically identical. What I was then left to consider was that, if the two
children were capable of making the same image with almost no difference
in developmental skill, then their differences had to be a result of something
other than age.
The work of Phivi Antoniou and Richard Hickman conducted a study on
childrens engagement of art that made some of Paige and Raes differences
more clear (Antoniou 2012). Essentially, although both girls had similar
relationships with art that resulted in them using similar drawing programs,
ultimately their individual differences led to the different artistic and
aesthetic techniques that were made so clear in their collaborative process.
Rae is eight years old. She, as Daniel Walsh emphasizes, has already
cultivated many different forms of self that inform her decisions (Walsh
1999). She loves to sing, dance, and perform for people. She is also a big
sister who loves to be in charge of others. These idiosyncrasies lead to a
little girls who requires deliberate plans and order in her art practice.
Mistakes throw her off and she doesnt like when her little sister takes the art
to a place she doesnt want it to go. Her aim is realism, art that can be
easily recognized by an audience and appreciated for its appearance (Barrett
2012). Rae emphasized on multiple occasions how important it was to her
that other people liked her art and that it looked good. Very few of these
individual preferences for aesthetics have anything to do with her age but do

have a lot to do with Rae as a person. Her art is a reflection of her world, not
just her age and skill level.
Paige, on the other hand, is a little sister. She is more shy and though
she loves to sing like her sister, she is more comfortable being the follower
than the leader. Her first concern in art is where Raes painting is. However,
Paige demonstrated that she too had a unique way of making art that
couldnt easily be pinned to her age. She, like Rae, is used to the order of art
class in school. But unlike Rae, Paige embraces the freedom of the activity
by testing the limits of the materials. Paiges artistic self revolves around an
open and experimental attitude towards her work. She loves to try things,
even if they dont look realistic or aesthetically pleasing. Paiges final
product may not look particularly realistic or impressive but the process by
which it was created offer insight into Paiges individuality.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, it is important that scholars of art education remember
that every child is his or her own person with his or her own views of what
makes good art. These differences are insight into a childs artistic self and
cannot always be defined by age. Attention must be paid to the artistic
process and how it suggests a childs aesthetic tastes. In looking closer and
letting go of conventional beliefs about children, much more can be learned
about who children are as people. Every child is an individual with their own
reasons for making art the way they do; sometimes it is our job as adults and

researchers to give them the chance to do make art freely and learn from the
experience.

References
Antoniou, P., & Hickman, R. (2012). Children's engagement with art: Three
case
studies. International Journal of Education through Art, 8(2), 169-182.
doi:10.1386/eta.8.2.169_1
Barrett, T. (2012). Why is that art?: Aesthetics and criticism of contemporary
art (2nd ed.). New
York: Oxford University Press.
Walsh, D. J. (1999). Constructing an artistic self: The historical child and art
education. Visual
Arts Research, 25(2), 4-13.
Wilson, B. (1977). An iconoclastic view of the imagery sources in the
drawings of young people.
Art Education, 30(1), 4-12.

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