The Drawings and Painting of Children
By Robert Coles, edited by Margaret Sartor
Houghton Mifflin & Company, Boston/New York/London, 1992
Throughout his three decades of exploring the ways children understand their worlds, child psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Coles (Children in Crisis series; The Spiritual Life of Children ) has asked youngsters to draw pictures. In this book, Margaret Sartor selected and edited fifty of the most stirring and revealing of these collected drawings and asked Coles to comment specifically about each one, recalling each young artist and the context of each work. Taking care to avoid over interpretation, Coles first offers an extended illustrated essay about the realities of childhood. He observes that “often children don’t want to talk very much” and that his interaction with them has been limited by language and social barriers as well. Their Eyes Meeting the World looks at more than the visual life of children, it gives an insightful and respectful glimpse of their inner lives.
