I find Nick Cave’s Soundsuit Sculptures to be so inspiring! These images seem appropriate for a celebratory sunny-Friday-afternoon post. It has been said of his works that they “lend themselves so well to the kinder angels of human nature, people can’t help but laugh contentedly when coming face to face with them.”
Soundsuit Sculptures by Nick Cave.
Ta da! Just this past weekend I FINALLY finished creating a website for my artwork. It’s taken me a loooong time to finish documenting my work from my most recent show, to edit the images, and to get all them all online. You can check out the final result here: www.ameliaepp.com.
Great painting/collage lesson idea! Thanks for sharing, funkinrussell!
Landscape and Cityscape Collages (Grades 3 and Up)
I came up with a lesson on landscape and cityscape collages.
This lesson introduces
- landscape & cityscape around the world
- color relationships
- value
- shapes (landscape-biomorphic / citycape-geometric forms)
- space/depth (overlapping cutouts)
- texture
- collage
- painting techniques
- color mixing
Students can also learn from abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Paul Jenkins.
You guys can demo painting techniques inspired by these artists
- dripping
- splatter (tooth brush preferred or you can flick the brush)
- dabbing
- free flowing washes
- loose strokes
- texture using sponges, feathers, branches, tip of brush handle, etc.
You can also mention about Matisse’s paper cut outs (artist who made collages at the end of his career).
Instead of having to demo color and techniques all in one day. You can introduce them to color as a lesson plan as well as painting techniques on separate days. In other words, you can break it into one lesson plan each day until you get to the big project.
By the way here’s a hand out/eval form that I made. You can have your students fill out the form at the end of the project or the next day. Have your kids hang them on the wall and have them present their piece.
This is just a summary of this lesson. You are free to change anything about this lesson.
I was thinking about making a new tumblr w/ art lessons, but I’ll keep it here. You guys know I’m human. :) To all my educators who are following me, do you guys want me to upload lesson plans?
-Russell
I visited the Kelowna Art Gallery last week, while on a little Easter break trip to the Okanagan. I really enjoyed seeing their current exhibition, the Okanagan Print Triennial, which features a really diverse range of works. It was great to see so many explorations within the realm of printmaking. I was also really impressed with a room at the gallery that the education department had set up, in which visitors could try out many different kinds of printmaking, including linoprinting, monoprinting, silkscreening, collagraphy, and more! I’ve been considering offering a collagraphy class for teens, so it was interesting to see the collagraphy plates that the gallery had prepared. Above, are some images of the collagraphy station at the gallery - which gives me some great ideas for a future class!
I like this idea for a painting lesson that involves expressing mood through colour and weather. These are beautiful examples of student work! Thanks for sharing, imyourartteacher!
4th Grade Mood Paintings.
Originally I was going to do a ceramic project with the 4th grade, however, when the clay did not arrive on time I had to come up with something on the fly. I looked over the art curriculum to see what else they hadn’t yet worked on, and I decided to do a painting unit in which they explored mood through color.
I searched the internet a little first, since this is kind of an abstract concept for a fourth grader, I wanted to see what other people had done to hopefully give me a little inspiration. What I found was a crayola lesson that used weather to express a mood. While I wasn’t crazy about the lesson plan itself, I LOVED the artwork they used to inspire the lesson. So I used that as inspiration for my own lesson.I had my students look at Louisa Chase’s “Cloudburst”, De Goya’s “Spring”, and Charles Burchfield’s “September Wind and Rain”. We talked about the different colors and weather in each painting, and how they added a mood or emotion to the work.
I then had my students break up into pairs, and assigned each pair a mood. Together, the pairs had to complete a work sheet in which they described different ways to use only color and weather to express the assigned mood. They also had to create thumbnail sketches, or small rough rough drafts, of images they could eventually turn into a painting.
I’m glad I had them work together at first, I think having someone to talk it out with really helped them grasp the concept.
The images included in this post are some of the finished products. We used flat washes of paint to cover large areas, and then liquid tempera to fill in the details. Overall I am very happy with the way these paintings turned out. It was a challenge at first, but worthwhile in the end!
I like to visit this blog, smartclassroommanagement, from time to time, as the author provides some really helpful strategies for classroom management. He seems to take a very respectful and thoughtful approach to relating to students, which I appreciate. This particular post is his ‘best of’ classroom management strategies from 2011 and it’s a great list of links. I find that the blog is pretty elementary-focused, but there are definitely some strategies that can be used in high school classrooms, as well.
I’ve been trying to keep a teaching journal over the past couple months, tracking my successful and, um, ‘less successful’ subbing days. I find that this helps boost my morale, as it reminds me of the things I’ve done that have worked, and it helps me to feel as if I’m taking a mindful and constructive approach to improving my practice (even though subbing can be so random, when you’re in a different classroom almost every day that you teach). As part of this reflection process, I find that it’s nice to visit a resource - such as the Smart Classroom Management blog - to get me out of my own head and to learn from others’ experiences and expertise.
![theatlantic:
A Slow Books Manifesto: Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.
Why so much emphasis on what goes into our mouths, and so little on what goes into our minds? What about having fun while exerting greater control over what goes into your brain? Why hasn’t a hip alliance emerged that’s concerned about what happens to our intellectual health, our country, and, yes, our happiness when we consume empty-calorie entertainment? The Slow Food manifesto lauds “quieter pleasures” as a means of opposing “the universal folly of Fast Life”—yet there’s little that seems more foolish, loudly unpleasant, and universal than the screens that blare in every corner of America (at the airport, at the gym, in the elevator, in our hands). “Fast” entertainment, consumed mindlessly as we slump on the couch or do our morning commute, pickles our brains—and our souls.
That’s why I’m calling for a Slow Books Movement (one that’s a little more developed than this perfectly admirable attempt).
In our leisure moments, whenever we have down time, we should turn to literature—to works that took some time to write and will take some time to read, but will also stay with us longer than anything else. They’ll help us unwind better than any electronic device—and they’ll pleasurably sharpen our minds and identities, too.
To borrow a cadence from Michael Pollan: Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.
Aim for 30 minutes a day. You can squeeze in that half hour pretty easily if only, during your free moments—whenever you find yourself automatically switching on that boob tube, or firing up your laptop to check your favorite site, or scanning Twitter for something to pass the time—you pick up a meaningful work of literature. […]
If you’re not reading slowly, you’re doing yourself—and your community—a great wrong. As poet Joseph Brodsky said in his 1987 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “Though we can condemn … the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books, we are powerless when it comes to [the worst crime against literature]: that of not reading the books. For that … a person pays with his whole life; … a nation … pays with its history.”
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
This article was just what I needed to hear - to remind me to fit some time for reading into my daily routine. Sadly, my daily reading time allotment has really dwindled lately. It has largely been usurped by random online meanderings, as this article suggests. But I’ve been thinking about upping my daily reading time since I subbed for grade 11 and 12 English classes a few weeks back, during which I supervised hour-long silent reading sessions. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that most of the students actually spent the time reading (for a substitute teacher on the Friday before spring break!). Luckily, I’d brought a book along with me to school that day, and I was able to join in the quiet energy of the group silent reading period. This experience reminded me of the value of setting aside daily ‘silent reading’ time. I wanted more! This week I’ve taken the advice of the writer, above, and have been reading for at least 30 minutes each evening - and I plan to keep this going!](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1hyj77Ph51qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
A Slow Books Manifesto: Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.
Why so much emphasis on what goes into our mouths, and so little on what goes into our minds? What about having fun while exerting greater control over what goes into your brain? Why hasn’t a hip alliance emerged that’s concerned about what happens to our intellectual health, our country, and, yes, our happiness when we consume empty-calorie entertainment? The Slow Food manifesto lauds “quieter pleasures” as a means of opposing “the universal folly of Fast Life”—yet there’s little that seems more foolish, loudly unpleasant, and universal than the screens that blare in every corner of America (at the airport, at the gym, in the elevator, in our hands). “Fast” entertainment, consumed mindlessly as we slump on the couch or do our morning commute, pickles our brains—and our souls.
That’s why I’m calling for a Slow Books Movement (one that’s a little more developed than this perfectly admirable attempt).
In our leisure moments, whenever we have down time, we should turn to literature—to works that took some time to write and will take some time to read, but will also stay with us longer than anything else. They’ll help us unwind better than any electronic device—and they’ll pleasurably sharpen our minds and identities, too.
To borrow a cadence from Michael Pollan: Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics.
Aim for 30 minutes a day. You can squeeze in that half hour pretty easily if only, during your free moments—whenever you find yourself automatically switching on that boob tube, or firing up your laptop to check your favorite site, or scanning Twitter for something to pass the time—you pick up a meaningful work of literature. […]
If you’re not reading slowly, you’re doing yourself—and your community—a great wrong. As poet Joseph Brodsky said in his 1987 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “Though we can condemn … the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books, we are powerless when it comes to [the worst crime against literature]: that of not reading the books. For that … a person pays with his whole life; … a nation … pays with its history.”
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
This article was just what I needed to hear - to remind me to fit some time for reading into my daily routine. Sadly, my daily reading time allotment has really dwindled lately. It has largely been usurped by random online meanderings, as this article suggests. But I’ve been thinking about upping my daily reading time since I subbed for grade 11 and 12 English classes a few weeks back, during which I supervised hour-long silent reading sessions. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that most of the students actually spent the time reading (for a substitute teacher on the Friday before spring break!). Luckily, I’d brought a book along with me to school that day, and I was able to join in the quiet energy of the group silent reading period. This experience reminded me of the value of setting aside daily ‘silent reading’ time. I wanted more! This week I’ve taken the advice of the writer, above, and have been reading for at least 30 minutes each evening - and I plan to keep this going!
As promised in my last post, these are some images taken at a collaborative design and community engagement session that I helped facilitate last week. The exercise pictured here was a warm-up activity (akin to those used by urban planner, James Rojas) meant to get a group of people involved in envisioning a potential space that could serve as a work space and community hub for artists, designers, farmers, entrepreneurs, and others. It was fun to see adults (from many different disciplines) get so fully and playfully engaged with three-dimensional design (using blocks of recycled styrofoam and post-it notes!).
This is a video about the urban planner, James Rojas, and his approach to leading imaginative warm-up sessions for work with planners, organizers, and organizations. He facilitates activities that are “visual, tactile, and playful,” and his basic goal is to “create environments that elicit ordinary people’s ideas and solutions to urban problems.” Interestingly, James Rojas’ work is inspired by educator Doreen Nelson’s Design-based Learning methodology. The video describes one particular type of workshop he leads, in which participants (re)design parts of cities using colourful recycled objects.
Over the last year, I’ve led a few different classes for elementary-aged students on the topics of urban planning, public art, and architecture. Even before learning about James Rojas, I found that I gravitated towards his approach - incorporating play, exploration, and recycled materials into my lessons. I’ve found, time and again, that students get very excited about participating in these types of activities, and that they are eager to learn about and re-imagine built environments.
Just last week, I helped to facilitate a collaborative design and community engagement session for a group of about 50 adults, making use of some James Rojas style activities. Much like the younger groups I’d previously worked with, the participants were eager to jump in and engage with three-dimensional materials to imagine a potential space. I will post some pictures of this workshop soon!
On Monday I finished up teaching an after school art class for a group of 7-11 year-olds which was all about buildings and architecture. It was a great group, and they did some fabulous work.
We began by talking about elevation drawings - discussing their purpose, and the details that are included in them. The students created their own elevation drawings, showing scale, building materials, landscaping, etc. Next we discussed texture, and they created collages of buildings (and the surrounding landscape) using fabric, paper, and various recycled materials. Lastly, we discussed architectural models, looking at examples of models created for buildings by Zaha Hadid, OMA, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Frank Gehry, among others. The students then created their own models, focusing on landscaping, as well as building design. Again, we used an assortment of recycled materials for this project (I got a load of off-cut mat board and foam core from a local framing shop which came in handy for this activity).
For the last class, the students assembled their models as a city, incorporating model buildings (i.e. boxes painted white) that I’d created for my Re-imagining Towns and Cities class last October. I mounted and hung the students’ work from the previous classes, and their parents came at the end of the class for our closing exhibition.
Wow, I fell off the blogging band wagon for a while there. After the crazy lead-up to my show, and then a crazy month of teaching and a million other things I’m back! I’m still waiting to take proper images of my artwork from the show, but in the meantime, here are some installation shots. More to come soon!
I am currently preparing for an exhibition of my artwork which will take place at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery, beginning on February 9th. It’s going to be crazy getting everything ready for it (holy, framing is time consuming - especially for a perfectionist like myself), but I’m getting pretty excited! It’s my first solo show. Once all the work is framed and up, I plan to post some images. So stay tuned!
Ha ha, as a new substitute teacher…this is TOO REAL. Good question, though.
Problem or Opportunity?
I’m starting to think about a class for 12-15 year-olds on sculpture and narrative that I’m planning to teach in March. While doing some research, I just came across this interesting assignment on DavidTMiller’s Weblog which is about storytelling and furniture (His blog is a great source of high school lesson ideas! It seems like he does some pretty incredible things with his students). Perhaps I will incorporate some of these ideas into my class:
Furniture Re-story(ation)
We have been considering the idea of stories and how they are delivered, received, altered, purposed and re-purposed (recontextualized). We have explored textual and graphic approaches to narratives related to art history, our personal history, and inanimate objects. We now turn our mind’s eye to furniture. You’ve heard of furniture restoration, but we will engage in furniture re-story(ation).
Prompts:
- What is the relationship between furniture as object and furniture as concept?
- How might the notion of function relate to furniture as object and furniture as concept?
- How might objects formerly known as furniture become re-storied?
Goals & Objectives: Explore the constructs of furniture and function and their relationships to our material and social culture.
Activity 1: Reconceptualize a piece of furniture through a process of deconstruction, addition and embellishment.
Activity 2: Write a fictional narrative involving your re-storied furniture and post to the “writing” page of your WordPress site.
(The image, above, is of Joseph Cornell’s Untitled (The Hotel Eden) from 1945)
Since I’ve been writing a bit about artists who inspire me here (i.e. Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse), I thought I should post some works by Paul Klee. I’ve been thinking about his work a lot lately. In fact, I was reading a book about his life the other night before going to bed, and then had strange and vivid dreams about the Bauhaus! Lesson learned: I should make a habit of reading about art before bed.
In my reading, I came across this lovely quote by Paul Klee, written in his diaries in 1901:
“Actually, the main thing now is not to paint precociously but to be or, at least, to become an individual. The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions. Not only to master life in practice, but to shape it meaningfully within me and to achieve as mature an attitude before it as possible. Obviously this isn’t accomplished with a few general precepts but grows like Nature.”
(The works above are: Monument in Fertile Country, 1929 and Monument on the Border of Fertile Country, 1928)
I am an artist and art educator, currently living in Gibsons, BC. In this blog, I am collecting thoughts, experiences, and resources on the topics of art education, peace education, and environmental education. This is a means to motivate myself to develop my projects and ideas and to elicit feedback and responses from others. Please post comments, resources, links, etc.! I'd love to hear from you! To learn more about me and my artwork, visit my website: www.ameliaepp.com.
