Each year as Fall begins, the art room transforms from a BLANK CANVAS into an evolving rainbow of colors and new ideas.The structure of the next three months is simple: each artist is given a 12″x12″ canvas to paint throughout the semester and one color per week, plus white, offered with a variety of traditional and unique tools to use. The slow rollout of one color per week, plus white, allows the artists to explore TINTING (mixing pigment with white) thoroughly. Layer after layer this process produces wonderfully worked paintings and shows the class that art can be created over a long period of time. PATIENCE, FOCUS, EXECUTIVE FUNCTION SKILLS (Planning/Organizing) and ATTENTION TO DETAIL are a few of the things ingrained through this journey.
There will be many different approaches to these paintings: Some will focus on COVERAGE and completely obliterate what they did the week before, EXPERIMENTERS will use every tool in the book to create new effects, BATHERS will need to plunge in deep with their hands and arms, NEATNIKS will be precise and calculated, never spilling a drop, SHAPERS will focus on geometry and REALISTS, who don’t really subscribe to the whole ABSTRACT thing, will do their thing.
There will be a few SECRET INGREDIENTS thrown in towards the end to shake it up before the paintings go home at the Winter break. My hope is that when your kids come home on Thursdays you will ask them about their painting experience. Chances are, there will be some reminders of the day on their clothes (which will wash out mostly) to cue you into these discussions. I know all too well how it can sometimes be hard to get much information from children about their goings- on at school. Hopefully, this class will provide a window of opportunity.
Class 1 is devoted to one pastel drawing encompassing the entire arc of the class, (minus the surprises) into one art-making session. Again, this process is done to show the artists that if one works slowly over time (in this case 20-25 minutes) on a single drawing, it can build and become more interesting and complex. The rewards in the end are self-evident to the makers.
