Perspective and Other Drawing Systems

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Willats, John

Dubery, Fred

Crafts & Hobbies

Xs Books

In Art and Representation, John Willats presents a radically new theory of pictures. To do this, he has developed a precise vocabulary for describing the representational systems in pictures: the ways in which artists, engineers, photographers, mapmakers, and children represent objects. His approach is derived from recent research in visual perception and artificial intelligence, and Willats begins by clarifying the key distinction between the marks in a picture and the features of the scene that these marks represent. The methods he uses are thus closer to those of a modern structural linguist or psycholinguist than to those of an art historian. Using over 150 illustrations, Willats analyzes the representational systems in pictures by artists from a wide variety of periods and cultures. He then relates these systems to the mental processes of picture production, and, displaying an impressive grasp of more than one scholarly discipline, shows how the Greek vase painters, Chinese painters, Giotto, icon painters, Picasso, Paul Klee, and David Hockney have put these systems to work.
 But this book is not only about what systems artists use but also about why artists from different periods and cultures have used such different systems, and why drawings by young children look so different from those by adults. Willats argues that the representational systems can serve many different functions beyond that of merely providing a convincing illusion. These include the use of anomalous pictorial devices such as inverted perspective, which may be used for expressive reasons or to distance the viewer from the depicted scene by drawing attention to the picture as a painted surface. Willats concludes that art historical changes, and the developmental changes in children's drawings, are not merely arbitrary, nor are they driven by evolutionary forces. Rather, they are determined by the different functions that the representational systems in pictures can serve.
 Like readers of Ernst Gombrich's famous Art and Illusion (still available from Princeton University Press), on which Art and Representation makes important theoretical advances, or Rudolf Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception, Willats's readers will find that they will never again return to their old ways of looking at pictures.

Art and Representation: New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

Making Sense of Children's Drawings

The message of this book is a simple one: children learn to draw by acquiring increasingly complex and effective drawing rules. In this regard, learning to draw is like learning a language, and as with language children use these rules creatively, making infinite use of finite means. Learning to draw is thus, like learning a language, one of the major achievements of the human mind. Theories of perception developed in the second half of the 20th century enable us to construct a new theory of children's drawings that can account for their many strange features. Earlier accounts contained valuable insights, but recent advances in the fields of language, vision, philosophy, and artificial intelligence now make it possible to resolve the many contradictions and confusions inherent in these early writings. John Willats has written a book that is accessible to psychologists, artists, primary and junior schoolteachers, and parents of both gifted and normal children.

Teen & Young Adult

Psychology Press

The message of this book is a simple one: children learn to draw by acquiring increasingly complex and effective drawing rules. In this regard, learning to draw is like learning a language, and as with language children use these rules creatively, making infinite use of finite means. Learning to draw is thus, like learning a language, one of the major achievements of the human mind.  Theories of perception developed in the second half of the 20th century enable us to construct a new theory of children's drawings that can account for their many strange features. Earlier accounts contained valuable insights, but recent advances in the fields of language, vision, philosophy, and artificial intelligence now make it possible to resolve the many contradictions and confusions inherent in these early writings.  John Willats has written a book that is accessible to psychologists, artists, primary and junior schoolteachers, and parents of both gifted and normal children.

Routledge

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