One thing I’ve been thinking about is if you showed a person from say the middle ages my artwork, or really any stylised/cartoony art would they be able to recognise it as animals, or just abstract shapes and colours. Is it just from exposure over time that people naturally understand what it is supposed to be? If you showed them an emoji or some such would they recognise it as a face? It seems such an obvious and simple representation of a face now, like whether or not I was born with the ability to recognise a yellow smiley face sticker as a face, but I don’t ever remember a time of not knowing. Actually One of my very earliest memories is seeing arrows on street signs whilst in a car and wondering what these symbols were, it’s not natural to me to recognise these types of symbols, but a smiley face represents a mouth and eyes, albeit very simplistically but still you come to make a connection to it and don’t need it explained. Would I have recognised it if I was born 200 years earlier?
I wonder how far back the earliest recognition would go. What do you reckon..... I’m not sure exactly when people would have first stared drawing in this kind of way or if there was always outliers who drew a primitive version of “cartoons”, and what they may have been without preexistinb inspiration to feed off in some way. An inspiration that’s always there like growing up seeing cartoons, stylised characters, that normalises it in you brain. Like anything you see posted on the front page of furaffinity right now, I guess is like how you could say the entire human population spawned from Adam and Eve, and eve from Adams rib, or something like that.
I like how it’s developed over time, in that many cartoons that really don’t look a whole lot like the people or species they’re supposed to be, and yet are instantly recognisable as such. And they can continue to get progressively more abstract without I suppose BEING abstract