ABSTRACT
Drawing or painting creates pictorial space. At a very elementary level every drawn shape can be seen as a figure that is distinct from its background and tends to protrude from the picture plane, while the ground appears to extend behind it. Thus, by virtue of drawing a contour the child also creates pictorial space. True, the figure-ground constellation can be said to yield pictorial space in only an elementary and undifferentiated sense. Drawing a figure that stands out from its background does not yet address the essentially intractable problem of representing on a flat, two-dimensional surface a solid object extended in three-dimensional space.
