John Willats

John Willats (died April 2006)^[1] was a psychologist and artist known for his research on pictorial systems of depiction and perspective, which included a taxonomy of the methods of visual projection used by various artists.^[2] He was considered an expert on children's drawings and how children develop drawing abilities.^[3]

Willats studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art. He had degrees in mechanical sciences and psychology. He worked under the supervision of Richard Wollheim at London University.^[4] He was teaching sculpture and drawing at Walthamstow School of Art when along with Fred Dubery, he published his first book, Drawing Systems^[5] Willats was an Honorary Research Fellow at the Polytechnic of East London^[6] and was an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Birmingham.^[7] He was a professor at Loughborough University.

In 2000, Willats completed a sculpture celebrating the millennium in a former hometown of Bradford-on-Avon, England. The sculpture is a life-sized representation of a mill girl, known as "Millie", that celebrates the town's history.^[8]

In Perspective and other drawing systems (1983), Willats and Dubery defined formal categories for pictorial systems, which they called projection systems.^[9][10] Willats posited that people have an innate capability to understand the grammar of pictorial depictions, which is related to Chomsky's theory of universal grammar.^[11] In Making sense of children's drawings, Willats proposed that children learn drawing in a manner comparable to language learning, by picking up increasingly complex rules of depiction.^[5]

• Dubery, F. & Willats, J. (1972). Drawing systems. Studio Vista.
• Dubery, F. & Willats, J. (1983). Perspective and other drawing systems. The Hubert Press.
• Willats, J. (1997). Art and representation: New principles in the analysis of pictures. Princeton University Press.
• Willats, J. (2006). Making sense of children's drawings. Psychology Press.

• Willats, J. (1977). How children learn to draw realistic pictures. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 29(3), 367–382.
• Willats, J. (1981). What do the marks in the picture stand for? The child's acquisition of systems of transformation and denotation. Review of Research in Visual Arts Education, 7(1), 18-33.
• Willats, J. (1987). Marr and pictures: an information-processing account of children's drawings. Archives de Psychologie, 55(213), 105-125.
• Willats, J. (1992). The representation of extendedness in children's drawings of sticks and discs. Child Development, 63(3), 692-710.
• Willats, J., & Durand, F. (2005). Defining pictorial style: Lessons from linguistics and computer graphics. Axiomathes, 15(3), 319-351.