Week 7: Playing, Creativity, Possibility; & New School Art Styles: the Project of Art Education; Post Modern Principles:

Jon, What if you don’t make art ever again? 

Discomfort is where we grow.  It’s the place that makes us feel different. It’s where we want to change and make things better. So if you have to boil it down to something, make sure you are enjoying the process and letting that process find a new home with new meaning. We all have a hard time being the one in front of the group. I have a very difficult time being there. Time will give us the confidence to show that we are great artists/teachers for our students. So Jon if you are doing this for yourself and for your art, then please do not let anything get in your way!

Ashley, Great Video

Student led projects can be some of the most meaningful things that a group of young people can do together. They learn to find ways to communicate with each other and find self worth that lives with them throughout life.

Right now I’m doing a project that has the student led curriculum for the semester that starts off with them brainstorming with what they want to change in their school, community or world.  This would be a great project for Mississippi students to rethink and remake their own community into something better in the long-run. Teaching them to grow and to help themselves.

Olivia Gude interview, she talks about playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X56zkWfXCUo

Playing, Creativity, Possibility:

 The very first paragraph between the teacher and her student goes right to why PLAY needs to be in the classroom.  ANXIETY “I don’t know what to do,” Jane responds when told to get down to work. “It’s easy,” the teacher says for the 27th time today. “Just think of things that don’t go together and put them in your painting.” The student whines, “I can’t think of anything.” The frustrated (and exhausted) teacher offers a plethora of suggestions that are each met with a disconsolate sigh.”

Suggesting what a student should do without showing it to them first, through the interaction of play, can stop us all. I know that, for me, when I start a new project that I have never explored before, it is hard to begin if we don’t understand where the work might go. For me, I like to PLAY around with different ideas, materials and see what can work until I find what the work is telling me. I would also have a huge amount of anxiety trying to work in that environment.

We have to surrender to the process of making art through play, creativity and the imagination that each of us has. When did we lose that in our lives? As artists I think we try to hold on to that and that’s why some artists are never serious about life. They are committed to their art, but are they committed to themselves? We as teachers need to nurture that part inside of each student to allow them to surrender to the artist within them so that they can develop a creative soul and hold on to them self’s.

Michael an artist uses candles and smoke to create his artwork:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2552354/The-incredible-paintings-created-using-SMOKE-Artist-directs-carbon-atoms-canvas-create-amazingly-realistic-portraits.html

The investigations that each of us do when making artwork. This is a way we see into that unknown world that might suggest a different outcome than the one we first thought. This is what play is all about, workshoping through ideas and collaborating with yourself to find new artwork. This is needed for our students to see within the classroom and within ourselves in that classroom. This would help them understand that investigation is a fun way to see something new. Rogers’s talk about the openness of expression in what we create and that it is deeply rooted in finding solutions within the work. They can be stimulating and surprising to each of us. If we work through each new process and surrender to the creative activities, we will have the freedom to grow.

Post Modern Principles:

At first, I had a really hard time understanding where Dow was going with the 7 + 7 principles.  Olivia Gude starts talking about her list of contemporary art education curricula using more than 18 principles. I started to understand this article. Where she talks about the crisscross and overlapping the principles that actual art in the contemporary world came from. Page 12 “Art examples and projects in school art curricula should not be reductive representations of theoretical principles, but should reflect the complexity of actual art.” This is where the play comes in.  If we stay with the 7 + 7 principles, we are not letting our students or ourselves have a way to investigate different ways to do artwork.  Without that we do not have any self-expression to create. Page 12 “ Hot modernism, characterized by artists such as Duchamp and the Dadaists, has not been adequately in K-12 art discourses despite the face that such artist are far more likely to be cited as influential to today’s art world”. I feel that they helped pave the way for contemporary artists having a bigger voice with what art or the art story has to tell.  We always have to remember where art started and understand the path it has taken.  So, that our art can stand and find its place among them.