Contemporary visual art, illustration and literature for children: Making connections between creative worlds

Abstract

The following text starts from two basic assumptions normally accepted by the scientific community that study, within the vast arena of educational sciences, the field that relates to children's education. The first assumption is the one which states the idea of the significance of quality literature for children, experienced and provided from the very beginning of any educational process or cycle. This is of crucial importance for the formation and attraction in reading by a hypothetical future reader, until their adulthood. Reading, definitely, is of fundamental importance to the subjective constitution of the child. The second premise assumes that quality visual images provided by children's illustrations, is also important to expand on the effect and impact that the content of 1 Leonardo Charréu, é professor no Departamento de Pedagogia e Educação da Universidade de Évora e é investigador no CIEP, Centro de Investigação em Educação e Psicologia, onde coordena a linha de Investigação “Arte, Educação e Comunidade”, sendo igualmente membro colaborador no núcleo de Educação Artística no IADS, Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedades da Universidade do Porto. Licenciou-se em Belas Artes - Pintura na Faculdade e Belas Artes do Universidade do Porto, é mestre em História da Arte pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa e Doutor em Belas Artes pela Universidade de Barcelona e em Ciências da Educação pela Universidade de Évora. Tem cerca de cinco dezenas de trabalhos publicados em livros e revistas da especialidade. A componente artística na formação de professores, a cultura visual, os novos ambientes de educação informal e as relações entre arte e ciência, a cognição e a ilustração, são os seus principais interesses de investigação. leonardo@uevora.pt 2 writing and the "told story" has on these little readers. Finally, another idea, just as important, that will indeed be the main argument of this text, is that contemporary visual art, which is a cultural phenomenon that requires, indubitably, a lot of hybridity, diversity and complexity, has many aesthetic solutions that affect a significant number of children's book illustrators. Somehow, the children's contact with visual forms that have a performative dimension that is experimental and, in part, transferred from the current visual artistic proposals, is also a form of parallel visual aesthetic education. So children do not learn only from the text, they also learn from the visual, starting their preparation for the complex and vibrant visualities they face in their daily lives.