Sun and the Clouds

When I did my teacher training course we had a few sessions on child psychology and also some reading on art therapy and art's role in child psychology. The teaching training course was so intense and my first placement in a secondary inner-London school was such a -frankly- shocking experience for me, that all the reading I did at the time is a big blur in my head. Everyday felt like a battle just to stay alive and all my thoughts were initially focused on behavioural management rather than anything else. I do believe that some of that reading was very interesting, although I never had the time to go into detail on a particular subject or research further something that caught my eye.

Once I remember coming across a very interesting article from our reading list which I took to the school I was at for my second placement. This was a selective grammar school in outer London, with much less behavioural problems than my first placement. I was meant to sit in a classroom for an hour and a half on that day, while one of the older classes had a writing test and just "keep an eye on them". They seemed very absorbed in their task so I took out my article and read it on my desk. I remember I was told off so severely afterwards by another teacher for giving the wrong example and reading while I should have been doing something relevant to my job, like correcting papers or going through my registers. I did not even have the chance to explain what I was reading and how it was about child psychology. She said that she has been working as a teacher for ten years and she never had time to read anything other than correcting papers and I should start getting used to it, beginning from that moment onwards! I think I never wanted to become a teacher less than on that day.

Amongst the few things I actually managed to read during that period, was an article on interpreting young children's drawings when they were asked to draw their house and their family. These drawings typically include stick men or more advanced figures depending on the age of the children, a simple square house and triangle roof, pets, sometimes trees and other things, like the sun, a rainbow, butterflies, balloons and so on. I think the article had interpretations of the colours used, of the things drawn, the composition of the picture and position of the figures, scale of objects and intensity of line. What stood out to me was the statement that research had shown that the sun in children's drawings represents the father in the family and children who were growing up without a father or a father figure tended to not draw a sun in their picture. Children who were growing up with their father almost without fail had drawn a sun in their picture and a large percentage of those suns had a smile and eyes on them. When children growing up without a male role model or father eventually started to include a sun because of peer influence, they never included a smile on it. I found that very interesting to read but also thought it might be a lot of rubbish.

It must have lingered in my head though, because the next summer when I finished the teaching course and went home, I asked my mother to bring down from our storage above the bathroom, a file of drawings that I knew she kept from when I was a kid. I remember getting so upset and so angry as I was leafing through them and my hope fading away as even after the last of the dozen or so toddler drawings had finished I had not seen a single sun! There were oversized butterflies, a moon, stars, v-shaped birds like seagulls, a rainbow and a very big amount of clouds, but not a single sun.

I tried to find this article on the internet but I haven't been successful. I genuinely hope it is not true and only a big coincidence, but I suspect and I am afraid that these people have done a lot of research. I also came across another article on research done this time on drawings young children did of members of their family. This one is even worse in its findings than the one I read. The drawing comparison on the last page between children from intact families and those from separated families is quite overwhelming.

http://www.forensicpsychology.it/numero%20002/ippol_ing.htm

Anyway, I thought I should be able -at least now- to make a sun that kind of smiles using the clouds I seemed to use in abundance as a toddler. First attempts below.

I then cut some of the shapes out and messed around with them with Aretousa on the computer screen. Aretousa recognises the sun, but thinks my clouds are fish.

Sun

 the Clouds

Sun and the Clouds