Child Harbat is beginning to take her art seriously. At the ripe old age of 3 ½ she’s finally “applying herself” and “taking things seriously”. By this I mean she’s actually sitting on her rear end to undertake an activity for more than thirty seconds, without bouncing up like a prairie dog on lookout duty. Our first selected work is a group portrait of our family.
From her earliest pictures she’s always drawn the eyes especially large, a clear indication of importance of features. Eyes are in fact much smaller than ear but get special prominence in her illustrations. The circles beside the eyes in the center portrait (or confusingly in the mid-forehead in the left portrait) are cheeks. The nostrils and nose ridge are drawn in compared with the simple circle of earlier renderings.
But here’s something interesting: in another drawing, CH drew the face upside down, including all features as seen above, then rotated the page and drew another face upside down. It seems she sees a face as a collection of components and, while the components are usually all there, their relation to her viewpoint, and sometimes to each other, is arbitrary. I know of some studies in neuroscience of people with brain damage who see faces only as a collection of parts, and cannot immediately recognize a person, even one they’ve known for years. CH has no trouble with facial recognition but I’m fascinated by the evolution of her drawings and how something she knows well, like a face, still hasn’t become an ordered system in her mind. I’ll regularly post her drawings so we can see the progression of illustrative technique. Plus I think the big eyelashes are really f**king cute.
Writer, architect, father, husband.
The eyelashes are my fave too. I particularly like the curly hair on everyone and how the expressions on each person’s face are very different. I love them!
She is quite the budding artist. The second picture almost looks to me like a Raggedy Ann doll.