When should we put a name to a picture?

Abstract

It is only relatively recently that the Anglophone art-education community started publically to collate its communal body of research. There are at least three ways of getting art students interested in research. I focus on just one of the ways, and note that sometimes it may be most important to name to a picture, as an occasional tool to help visual interpretation. Especially during the development of someone’s intuitive theory of art. There is a question about what very young viewers intuitively try to interpret: (a) the meaning of the picture that they see, or (b) the artist’s idea of what the picture means. I put forward a way of sorting out a role for naming here: initial results seem to indicate that for young children settling on a name for a picture is as important as identifying an artist’s intent. Of course, criteria might change with development, but it is always interesting to look at research into the origins of an intuitive theory of pictures