Two weeks ago we started the winter session with a project using very old newsprint from rolls, lots of glue and a piece of cardboard. The session’s theme is Build.
So what’s the plan? Why are we making art from materials that look like our recycling bin? Isn’t art about beauty and mastering skill in order to render that beauty?
Some of you know me and are familiar with the projects I offer in the studio, others are participating for the first time. I thought this a good juncture to try to tell you about why I offer the projects I do to children that come to my studio.
There are many ways to approach art education with children just as there are many ways of thinking about how children learn and what art IS. Every individual child is a different kind of learner and every teacher has had a different path learning about both children and art.To quantify the varieties of approaches would require equations describing combinations and permutations learned (and forgot) in high school math. Suffice it to say it’s a big number considering the variables above.
My guiding principles come from decades of learning about early childhood education at school, my mentor art educators in Toronto, every art class I have taken and making art myself.
Here they are:
Making art with children- process over product
The developmental stages of children’s learning
Children are capable of choosing their own direction
The belief in artist’s constraints
Useful art materials are versatile
Purpose of the encounter
It’s all about relationship
Art with Children
Making art as a young child is more of an open ended encounter than a set of techniques that ends in something to hang on a wall. When we talk about process being more important than product we mean we honor the encounter over the finished product.
What do we want that encounter to be? It’s action, play, problem solving and immersion in tactile experience! There is a starting point but not a strict predetermined outcome. (although always some limits due to the space and the materials- more on that with artist’s constraints). It’s experimentation and messing about in a group, with that energy affecting everyone.
It’s the Making rather than what’s made.
The Developmental Stages of Children’s Learning
The idea that how we learn evolves as we age is not a rigid, linear, one size fits all progression but a gradual shift. Babies are their bodies and the sensations they feel. They begin their air breathing life as a bundle of potential- for language, mobility, awareness of self and others and the understanding of the physical world. They are gathering experience through their bodies and senses and putting it all together at an amazing pace. They are concrete learners and think with things. Watch any toddler work a room! By sometime during the school age years words and numbers make sense to them. They are ready for abstract thought. They are able to not only talk about things that are not present but to reason and argue with great skill.
Children are capable of choosing their own direction
This is a basic idea of developmental learning. If we take inspiration from the early years we believe that children can choose what they need. Think of how capable a 3 year old is! Most of the profound learning of the early years does not involve direct instruction, rather letting a child experience life- move and interact with people and things in a safe environment. In fact, more strongly, a child does not engage in learning tasks that are not meaningful to them. Not only are children capable in direction their own learning they have to!
Artist’s Constraints
Here’s where the contradictions arise. Because the world presents so many possibilities at any given moment to these creatures primed for taking on sensation and interactions there have to be some limits! How do you get started if anything is possible? There can be too much choice. Artists and children need a framework to create within- to exploit a medium, find novel ways to use a familiar material.
Versatile Materials
What makes a material a good one for an encounter with a child?
-the material can be changed in a variety of ways by the child
-the material is inviting to the child
-children can be independent in this altering of the material
-the encounter invites physical movement and experimentation
-the material is not too precious
-the arrangements made have the elements all artists consider- pattern, balance, value, color, proportion, scale, line, shape, texture
Purpose of the Encounter
I had a life drawing teacher who used the term ‘searching lines’ as we, his students worked at rendering a live model with charcoal on newsprint. He encouraged us to try without angst or too much thought to make a mark- the angle of a forearm or the twist of a torso, the length of an upper leg or the shape of a shadow on the side of a face. Start by approximating with sketchy light lines until you find the ones that look right.
Only by seeing how the marks relate to each other can you work on getting the proportion, value and shape that you see in the figure. (Learning to draw is another whole discussion!)
Searching Lines is a great term for thinking about art with children. Not just in reference to marks on a page but to the whole journey of self expression. Making art is a search for ways of representing ideas. Each encounter with a material is an opportunity to express something imperfectly, one moment in a thousand moments of trying. It’s the trying that gets you there.
My teacher was giving us permission not to judge ourselves. As we adults know, we are often terrible task masters to ourselves! I have the heard the words, ‘I can’t draw’ hundreds of times and what they usually mean is I can’t draw a__________. (Equating art with realistic drawing is yet another whole discussion!)
So I hope for the encounters between children and materials to be happy ones- active, playful, free of judgement and full of problem solving. The goal is to try to implement an idea through a material but also to learn about the material and the way it limits your initial plan. It is a two way dialogue. Children act on materials and the material’s properties define what the child can do with them. The materials talk back!
The purpose is participation!
Relationship
We work as a group and of course are affected by each other’s ideas! Thank goodness for other people’s ideas! They are windows into other possibilities. Often a direction spreads in a class and variations on a theme emerge. There is a positive kind of comparing that can happen that helps us define our own choices. Like a good conversation, a positive exchange of ideas helps us appreciate ourselves and others.
It’s a web of relationship in any children’s learning environment- child/fellow children/environment and teacher.
Paper Glue and Cardboard
The project we did our first class this winter involved a lot of newsprint, and glue and a cardboard base. Our starting point was a turn taking, feely cup exercise (can you describe the texture of the object inside without using your eyes?) I wanted to relate the idea of tactile texture to visual because what we were about to make would be very textured. The absence of color allows for seeing the light and dark created with the paper structures. Who knows if the connection made sense to anyone?
Next as a group we played with the newsprint. What does it feel like? What does it sound like? There was incredible thunder created by flapping!
How many ways can you make this paper not flat? I think of this as group idea generation, sharing the results of our actions.
Fold, twist, scrunch, roll, rip and combinations of these.
After this the invitation was to make a collage/assemblage with different kinds of surfaces. If you were an ant walking on the surface would be a varied terrain! Then individually with cardboard base, unlimited newsprint strips and glue each child acted on the paper different ways, applied glue with a brush to the paper or cardboard base and attached their forms.
The paper is thin so it’s easy to make many layers, keep adding glue and paper in different arrangements.
The collages children brought home are really souvenirs of a process. (Sorry about the filling of the recycling bin!)
What about beauty and skill at rendering it? It seems that the history of art is a long story about humans reacting to their existence and then artists continually reacting to each other. Art can express more than beauty because we experience many unbeautiful things. Art continually changes just as technology, culture and language does.
To be continued
