All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

6
Drawing 6: Croatia, “Ghosts and Skeletons in My
Closet,” Girl, age 12, c. 1991.
in laying a foundation for coping
with the dreaded reality. Thus, both
emotional well-being and dealing
with realities can be bolstered
through art, through the child’s
own drawings. In this section, I
present drawings illustrating fear
and the different ways that children
of war express it.
Drawings 6 and 7 show two
Croatian children’s fantasy
representations of their fear,
transforming it into an object of
their own creation. Drawing 6 (c.
1991) by a 12-year-old Croatian
girl, who titled it “Ghosts and
Skeletons in My Closet,” brings
fear into her familiar place that
once was safe – her home. In
the form of skeleton/mummylike
figures, evil enters through
windows or from a closet, leaving
blood on the floor.
The child artists whose work is seen in
Drawings 6 and 7 both seem focused on
uncontrolled threat. Yet, it is actually
positive that these children objectified the
overwhelming threat present in the war
zone. The ghosts and monsters were created
by them and served them by focusing their
attention on specific objects rather than on
a generalized unease in their actual world.
This is a first step in coping.
Other children drew fear in a more personal
or interior way, with human beings as the
central figures, perhaps forcing the viewer
to recognize that it is a child experiencing
the emotions that were put on paper. The
depiction of fear in Drawing 8 by a 6-yearold
Serbian girl is particularly raw. The
figure seems to hang in space, laid bare.
Drawing 7: Croatia, “Fear,” Boy, age 12, c. 1991.
Fear
In addition to rendering memories of
the horrors of enemy attacks and their
experience of escape, children of war draw
their fears, often in the form of animals,
monsters and supernatural symbols such as
ghosts. Fear consumes children during the
extreme threat of war and recognizing it and
making it the subject of one’s artwork can
be helpful.
Children’s depictions of their fears are clear
and communicate easily to us, the viewers.
Such drawings form an important vehicle
within which children can tap and express
their emotional life. Externalizing emotions
in some way can allow a child to release
some tension, can make a chaotic fearful
situation more understandable by bringing
meaning to it, can make part of the threat
more manageable and allow the child to
see herself as in control of some part of the
danger and terror, and can be a key element
The threat is all around and
continues to invade the child’s
private space. The viewer feels
the closeness of the threat to the
child’s psychological reality. The
danger shown in Drawing 7, by
an 11-year-old Croatian boy, is
immediate and overwhelming,
as made evident by the monster
taking in excess of half the page and being
more defined than the human figures. The
enormous dark-eyed sharp-toothed monster
attacks people who are
drawn both smaller
and in less detail. The
emotional dominance
of danger and fear
as represented by the
monster also is seen
in the use of stark
and varied colors, in
contrast to duller and
less varied colors of
people. The white of
the paper is the only
background. This lack
of context or scene
creates a sense of
being overwhelmed, of
unbound fear.
Drawing 8: Serbia, “Fear in Me,” Girl,
age 6, c. 1991.
Drawing 9: Terezin Concentration Camp, Girl, age 6, 1942-44.
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011