Through a Child’s Eye
Words by Alasdair Bell
An actual definition of drawing given by a child may be quoted in this connection, “First I think, and then I draw a line round my think.”
Roger Fry, Vision and Design
Drawing is a line around my thoughts.
Gustav Klimt
When Henry James writes, in the preface to his novel What Maisie Knew, that ‘small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than… their at all producible vocabulary’, he is presenting us with an image of the child which describes, in turn, the frustrations of the novelist. Childhood, for James, consists of a formless and immediate excess of feeling; a feeling which, in its immediacy, is much stronger than the language used to understand it. Language, or understanding, is secondary to the child, an afterthought needing to be produced, or something foreign requiring translation. If the novelist experiences the distance between perception and language as an obstruction, the child is all the richer for it. Without the mediation of language or representation, the child becomes a figure of freedom, of absolute presence, of paradisal innocence.
Picasso, Paul en Harlequin, 1924
As a novelist writing about the difficulties of writing a novel, James knows that there is no producible vocabulary that can perfectly capture these excesses and freedoms. Yet he is bound to language, both as a novelist and, we can say, as an adult. There is an immediacy, an excitement, to our experience which is always already at one remove from our communication or representation of it. And yet that feeling is what we are always found wanting, in our art, to represent, or, in our interpretations, to understand. Thus, James is speaking from a perspective that looks back at the child with a certain nostalgia, like, to use Kafka’s great phrase, ‘a cage, in search of a bird.’ His fantasy of childhood feeds an idealism, which we share today, in which we can grow up whilst staying the same, in which we can accumulate language and history, reach the heights of understanding, whilst still being able to see the world through a child’s eye, in all of its joy and play. ‘None of us’, writes Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation, ‘can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.’ The doing of the work of art, its play of form and colour and texture, is the world in which the child moves, frictionlessly, performing the vitality of the canvas. The saying of the artwork - its content, its iconography, its politics - belongs to the adult world of language, in all of its noise and self-importance. When that saying drowns out our doing, when our saying is found wanting (and the work of art found asking), how, we can ask, with a return to the innocence of childhood impossible, can we begin, again, to play?
In her book Picasso, Gertrude Stein summarises two centuries of art history in a single sentence: ‘In the nineteenth century painters discovered the need of always having a model in front of them, in the twentieth century they discovered that they must never look at a model.’ By the time of his arrival in Paris in October 1900, Picasso found himself in ‘a world of painters who had completely learned everything they could from seeing at what they were looking.’ Tracing a line from Seurat to Matisse, Stein describes a moment in the history of looking in which eyes, and lines, trembled, and artists began to doubt exactly what they could see. Their inherited forms of looking, in the mode of Courbet’s concrete realism, had cracked, and the need for new forms appeared. The question asked was whether it was possible to do anything besides ‘seeing at what they were looking’. A question, it seems, of searching for, and performing, a more suitable verb. One way to describe the craze of movements and manifestos at the start of the twentieth century, in the same way that Sontag argues for eroticism to replace hermeneutics with regards to language, would be as various attempts to find new ways of doing looking, and new ways of representing that doing. But, to use the movement Stein goes on to explore, cubism was not a final answer to that question. Rather, as with all movements and schools, it was another moment in, or variation of, the history of the question of looking (histories are always the stories of unanswerable questions). Just as the nineteenth century painters ‘discovered’ the model, the twentieth century painters ‘discovered’ forms of abstraction, and it is this repetition of certainty that Stein is smiling at, as it marks the limit, once again, of the permanence of our inventions and the impossibility of an innocent looking. A child’s looking. A child’s eye. The desire to look through the child’s eye is the desire to be free from the inevitable cracks and flaws that make up history and reveal our growing up to be a never-ending story, as much as we would like it to have a happy ending. For the child, endings are funny ideas. There can be no ending to doing, no final movement in the play between colour and shape. Only more play, or play itself. To do and carry on doing. To look and carry on looking. To play and carry on playing. This is the demand which the child, the child within us all, makes on the adult and which we must affirm, without nostalgia, if we are to experience the freedom of the play of the world.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games, 1560
Once, in Nice, I was watching two children play on the sloping sea wall. They were, it seemed, racing to see who could get to the top first. When the more agile child came within touching distance of the promenade, he paused, looked over his shoulder, and climbed down a few metres to rejoin his friend in the struggle. Thinking through what the looking of a child might involve allows us to think of our looking - our learned, habitual looking - as a game that we are all too eager to win. The child plays to play, affirms play, delights in the play of objects. The end of the game can only ever be the start of a new game, or simply one outcome of playing which the continuation of play will dissolve into insignificance. This essay began with two shared definitions of drawing, a fitting metaphor, in its intermediacy and provisionality, for the kind of looking and writing we have been exploring. It will end after adding a third, by Hélène Cixous: ‘There is no end to writing or drawing. Being born doesn’t end. Drawing is a being born. Drawing is born.’
