ABSTRACT
In the drawings of the human infant, the demarcation of the end of a line is pushed to a new developmental level when the child emphatically marks the end of a drawn line. In some of their earliest drawings, very young children often mark the end of ‘descending’ lines with explosive squiggles. Sometimes they may synchronise ‘ascending’ and ‘descending’ vocalisations with their production of ‘ascending’ and ‘descending’ lines and, in a one-to-one correspondence with the explosive marking of the end of the line, synchronise an equally explosive vocalisation. Children will also use the ascending and descending movement of the marker’s point or the pencil point to represent the rising and falling fl ight, sometimes in the handheld fl ight of the marker itself; sometimes making lines on a drawing surface to represent the fl ight of imagined projectiles beyond the drawing surface. The doomed journey of an aeroplane is a classic example, with its catastrophic moment-of-impact demarcated by sound and vision in synchrony. The dynamic-structure trajectory and impact appears frequently in adult human art too, a recent and excellent example being Anish Kapoor’s Shooting into a Corner in which a huge cannon fi res a projectile of red pigment into a corner of a gallery in the Royal Academy of Art, London (Kapoor, 2009). In such cases, both child and adult add further levels of representation, symbolisation and metaphor to a simple dynamic-structure. We simply do not know if the chimpanzee is capable of adding these further layers of meaning. However, at a structural or formal level – putting aside for a moment the question of representational values – there is ample evidence in the drawings and paintings of famous captive apes of the demarcation of the ends of painted and drawn lines. Later I will offer slight evidence of this demarcation of the end of a line made in the spontaneous drawing of one of my chimpanzees. In human childhood, the passage of development from the presentation of rising and falling to its representation on the drawing surface is very striking. Here is an observation of a child drawing, or perhaps writing about, the idea of descent.
