Integrative model of children’s representations of god in drawings

When confronted with the task to “draw god”, children have to solve a problem; they are being asked to produce a visual representation of an entity that they have never seen. It is true that some children may already have elaborated a pictorial repre-sentation of god (mentally or graphically) and for them, the task will seem easy. Other children will need to create a representation spontaneously. Resources for solving this problem are available within the child’s cultural context. For instance, the shape of the figure itself may be based on various religious representations of gods, iconic figurations of supernatural agents in fictional artefacts (paintings, movies, cartoons, etc.), advertisement, etc. The cultural context can also provide reference points for the valence attributed to colours or to different parts of an image composition. The drawings produced by children depends not only on their familiarity with these re-sources (socialization and educational aspects), but also on their cognitive abilities to grasp the concept of god, their emotional abilities to recognize and express the ac-companying feelings, artistic and physical skills, and the environmental resources provided for representing god. In choosing how they will represent god, and de-pending on their familiarity with and selection of contextual resources, children have to solve additional problems. For example, potential parental connotations of the con-cept of god can awaken attachment bonds to parental figures; religious prohibitions against creating representations of god can be in conflict with the requested task of drawing god; drawing a supernatural agent can activate skills for drawing an agent that is like a human being (with anthropomorphic and gender features, etc.) The pur-pose of this work is to integrate, to the extent possible, the results presented in parts II-V of this book, and to articulate the different factors in an integrated model that outlines possible strategies used to carry out the project of drawing go