606 - Their Eyes Meeting the World: The Drawings and Paintings of Children

Their Eyes Meeting the World: The Drawings and Paintings of Children
By Robert Coles, edited by Margaret Sartor
Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992. 133 pp. $30.00.

Pictures, writes Harvard child psychiatrist Robert Coles, are a tactful, sensitive way to link us to the concreteness of another person's life. Consider the story of twelve year-old Leola, an African American girl who is paraplegic from a poor farming community in Georgia. Leola believes that God put her here on eartb, and, through prayer, she is always with God. Leola's faithfulness is captured in her self-portrait as she is praying on her knees, saying, "I'm not me, I'm one of God's little ones."

In Their Eyes Meeting the World, Coles presents to readers an impressive sample of the artwork he has gathered for over thirty years from children around the world. While Coles used children's artwork to reaffirm their narratives in his other books, in this book the artwork takes center stage, and the narrative is secondary. The reader understands that there is more than the verbal and written way to tell stories. Children can use picture-stories to tell us about their lives and God.

Coles came to see the power of artistic expression through his mentors: the child psychoanalyst Anna Freud; the poet physician William Carlos Williams; and the child-teacher, Ruby, whom Coles first met when she was a child growing up in segregated New Orleans in the early 1960s. Coles solicited their advice when words and psychiatric tools proved fruitless, or the barriers of race and class seemed insurmountable. From Anna Freud, Coles learned that children use artwork as a visible statement to others (as well as to the self), about what life is like from their perspective. From William Carlos Williams, Coles learned that the best way to enter a dialogue with even agitated youngsters was "with a piece of chocolate, a few carefully chosen words ... (and) a box of crayons, a tin of paints, and a brush, some notepaper or drawing paper." From Ruby, Coles learned how art may be less threatening than talking, when she said, "I like it when he takes out crayons, and we draw pictures-then I don't need to talk." Ruby drew pictures that asserted her sense of differentness, which gave shape to her self-concept as a helpless black minority presence in a threatening white world.

From these teachers' lessons, Coles shares with us what he learned about the artistic life of children. From their artwork, the reader comes to appreciate anew the moral, political, and spiritual life of children, aspects that Coles has addressed in other volumes. For example, through the artwork we see children trying to leave their worldview to attend to another, as in the artwork of Larry, an eight year-old son of a landowner in Florida's citrus-belt. Larry drew a

607 - Their Eyes Meeting the World: The Drawings and Paintings of Children

picture of a large, boiling, orange sun, emitting rays that resembled shark's teeth, biting down on the hunched-over backs of ant-like migrant laborers in orange orchards. Larry understood that the daily labor of these marginal, vulnerable people translated into his family's wealth. Drawing for Larry was not only to render beauty but to make a moral, political statement regarding the rift between the oppressed and the oppressor.

The spiritual worldview was revealed in stunning fashion by twelve-year-old Martin's portrait of heaven and hell. This Swedish artist saw hell in dramatic, colorful flames of fire, with black being dominant, including a black dragon. Heaven, sketched on the same piece of paper, was softer in pastel tones, giving a fluid feeling to the indiscriminate shading.

There is also the comical depiction of Lot's wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back at Sodom and Gomorrah. Ten-year-old Joy Marie from Tennessee envisioned Lot's wife in a farcical manner: she is shaped as a diner-like salt shaker for the head and torso, with a cartoon-like bubble coming from her mouth saying "Help!"

For religious educators and clergy who find children in congregations and parishes still drawing colorbook pictures of Moses and Jesus, Coles reminds us that these children have been made a slave to someone's simplistic vision of biblical characters, rather than exercising their imagination in their own artwork. Granted, Coles often tells readers what they are seeing rather than letting readers struggle with the child's vision, and he sometimes psychoanalyzes the images rather than letting them stand on their artistic merits. But Coles makes readers want to start looking anew at the artwork on refrigerator doors and children's bedroom walls. If we abandon the security of talking about the invaluable artistic contribution children make, and lean in closely to these artworks, then we may become amazed and delighted with how children see themselves, each other, and God, the artist supreme.

Brett Webb-Mitchel

Duke Divinity School
Durham, NC