THE INFLUENCE OF CULTURAL MEDIA ON NATURAL
This paper will investigate the influence of cultural media on a child's natural unfolding of symbolic imagery. The paper's discussion will chiefly center upon two important academic works. In the first of those works, writers Brent and Marjorie Wilson discuss this paper's subject in their article, "An Iconoclastic View of the Imagery Sources in the Drawings of Young People." According to those authors, children begin producing art, and specifically, symbolic imagery, from the ages of two to eight (Wilson, 1977).
This important and complex article argues that the art that children first begin to create is drawn from universal symbols which are most likely to have come from cultural media. Cultural media, in this context, consists of anything from a cartoon program, a newspaper comic, an action hero magazine, photographs from magazines and the like. While many teachers previously assumed that children should not be encouraged to copy the works of other authors, these authors maintain that at no time in history did children "ever exist in a state unmodified by the customs of [their] own time and place" (Wilson, 1977, p. 5). This research suggests that it is not unusual, much less bad, for children to rely upon cultural media in their independent creation of art.
Our generation's children are then, influenced by the photography and print media, television broadcasts and motion pictures of our time. Some children are also influenced by the drawings of other children containing images of an action comic hero such as Batman. The theory which these two authors pose is that copying from the culture imagery is a process which is essential to a child's artistic development and that, contrary to popular misconception, children who copy become more, not less, adept as artists.
The Wilsons found that many children had already begun copying pre-existing cultural images before the ag...