(Image: Drawing from upside-down reference. (Left) Reference: Picasso’s Stravinsky, (Right) Student Drawing)<\/p>\n
I’ve volunteered as a teaching artist in the Mariposa School System for the Mariposa County Arts Council this year. I’m teaching art to two 5th grade glasses, one hour a week, over twelve weeks. I’m a little more than halfway through the session right now.<\/p>\n
I started them off with several right brain drawing exercises: the dual human profiles that create a\u00a0vase in negative space, drawing a complex image, while viewing it upside down, contour drawing without looking at your paper, etc. (one of my high school art teachers, Betty Edwards, actually wrote the book on right brain drawing techniques). Enough for them to gain a glimpse of what it feels like to draw in the right brain zone, as a seasoned artist does. Few of them could stay in the zone long, so in a short time, during every session, the buzz of talking would rise and I’d have to focus them once again, reminding them that they couldn’t be working in the right brain and talking at the same time. The left brain handles all communication. The right brain is incapable of conversation.<\/p>\n
We soon moved on to single point (vanishing point) perspective, discussions of the events and developments that triggered the transition from\u00a0representational art to\u00a0abstract art, systems utilized in abstract art, actual painting using these systems and last week, team work on a large collaborative painting (the most fun, so far).<\/p>\n
Working with these individuals, about to transition into\u00a0adolescence, has been a joy and eye opening.\u00a0In\u00a0these two classes of 24 to 30 students each, only a small percentage, 2 or 3 students per class, show a focused interest in art. I’m guessing this aligns with the percentage of\u00a0our society, as a whole, that shares this level of interest.\u00a0Naturally, these students of focused interest also show the most potential (also a likely reflection of society).<\/p>\n
More than this, to some degree, the art exercises reveal the personalities and psychological states of the students. The whole\u00a0class appears to truly enjoy learning about and participating in art, but a\u00a0couple\u00a0students have difficulty following instructions, others ignore the exercise and draw or paint what they want, one or two ask a lot questions, a couple are insecure about whether they are doing things properly, another\u00a0seeks precision, there are a couple of clowns, one does\u00a0not participate and another’s\u00a0actions reveal\u00a0them to be\u00a0working out some problems.<\/p>\n
I wonder if exercises in other subjects reveal similar things, if the same students exhibit the same behaviors consistently across all subjects or if students respond differently to each subject? Makes me wish I had more time with these kids. Would love to see\u00a0who each of these individuals\u00a0becomes in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Image: Drawing from upside-down reference. (Left) Reference: Picasso’s Stravinsky, (Right) Student Drawing) I’ve volunteered as a teaching artist in the Mariposa School System for the Mariposa County Arts Council this year. I’m teaching art to two 5th grade glasses, one hour a week, over twelve weeks. I’m a little more than halfway through the session … Continue reading “Who’s Teaching Who?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[4,29,26,30,31,27,28],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/stravinsky-student-drawing.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":406,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions\/406"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}