Project: Compare and Contrast

Hefty 2-Ply

Veiled Lady

Take a moment to look at these two images.

Seem pretty different at first glance, don't they? What if I told you these two pieces actually have a lot in common? Don't believe me do you? You're probably thinking, "Elisabeth, what on earth does a trash bag have to do with one of the most beloved sculptures at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts? The one is a beautiful marble carving, and the other is literally full of garbage." 

Appearances can be deceiving: that trash bag is actually carved out of marble too, and is currently on display at the Walker as part of the Lifelike exhibit. They may have been created almost 100 years apart, but both of these sculptures have similar techniques and ideas behind them. I didn't even realize this until a friend of mine pointed it out to me. In both works, the artists are showing off their skill by fooling your eye. They're both pushing the limits of the medium, making your brain think it's another material. The Veiled Lady looks like her head covering might flutter in the slightest breeze; Hefty 2-Ply seems as if it's about to fall over or burst at the seams. They're both very much products of their day, created out of the trends and fads of their respective time periods.

And yet these two pieces are also quite different as well. The Veiled Lady was created around 1860 by an Italian sculptor, Raffaelo Monti, known for his delicately carved work. The Veiled Lady seems like she might float away on a strong breeze. Monti's sculpture is romantic and alluring, showcasing the beauty of a woman with a veil over her face and flowers in her hair. His work is part of the Romanticism movement. 

In 1979, the Walker commissioned the American artist Jud Nelson to create a piece for their permanent collection. He decided to recreate a garbage bag filled with trash and spent the next two years carving it out of marble. Nelson is known for making hyper realistic sculptures of mundane things. He makes people see every day objects in a new light. I think his work relates to the ideas in the Pop Art movement.

At first, these two sculptures might not seem like they have anything in common, being created almost a century apart and as part of different art movements. And yet there are many ways in which they relate to each other, not just because they're made from the same material, but also by playing with viewers' perception of what's real.

Okay, so what I just did is known as Compare and Contrast. It's one of the most basic and commonly assigned essays any art student has to write. I did a very pared down version for you, but it's basically the same format whether someone is writing one page or ten pages:

Introduce the two pieces. 

Say what's different about them. 

Now how are they similar? (or vice versa) 

Conclusion. 

Each of those sentences could be a paragraph or a page, it's really based on how much detail you want/need to go into. And you don't have to get fancy or do a lot of research either. I looked up both of these sculptures starting with Google, then moved on to their respective museum websites. I could have gotten pretty much the same information by partaking in tours at the Walker and Minneapolis Art Institute as well. 

The reason I classified this post under the Project heading is because it's easy to replicate and is just as important to art education as creating work. Doing this exercise helps refine thinking and observation skills. It's also helpful for students to reflect on what they know by not just repeating facts. I always found in school that something stuck better when I wrote or talked about it rather than simply studying for a test. 

And this assignment can be adjusted for any grade level and doesn't have to be about ART per say. A kindergartner can say what the similarities and differences are between oranges and apples. Elementary students can paste images on a poster and write a list. Junior and senior high students can do research and write essays of varying depth. From personal experience, college students write 12 page term papers utilizing this same basic idea. 

Your kids could pick two comic book or video game characters, images from an art history textbook, clothing by two different fashion designers, pieces on display in a museum, etc. I think you get the idea. In a nutshell, it's what two things have in common and what they don't and providing some proof to back it up. 

Lesson Plan: Making Peace

One of the featured works,
The Fighter of the Spirit

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) has a plethora of resources for teachers. I've written about the museum before, but not their online presence. The MIA loves teachers and creates so much content for educators to use for free. Each month, they post a short lesson plan about a particular subject or work of art. The current feature is Making Peace; it highlights five pieces from the MIA's collection, and has a activities to go along with the lesson. It's like getting a one-on-one tour and discussion.

Perfect for your self-motivated, tech savy students. You could go through the whole lesson at once, or look at one piece each day for a themed week. The cool part about this, if you're local to Minnesota, is that your kids can read about the art and then actually go see it in person! You can stand in front of this statue, realizing how huge it is, noticing the little details that you can't see in a small image on a computer screen. You could make a scavenger hunt out of finding all five works in the museum, or call ahead for a tour related to the subject.

If you want to get the MIA's Teaching the Arts e-mail newsletter, you can sign up here. (scroll down a bit and you'll see the different newsletters you can subscribe to)

Author: Mary Ann Kohl

MaryAnn F. Kohl has written some of my favorite art activity books. She has published over 20 titles, from books focusing on American artists to a more global perspective. Unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity to read all of her works, but the few that I have are wonderful. Each project is explained well with a short lesson about an artist or art history to go along with it. MaryAnn is a former school teacher with years of experience. She and I have the same view about teaching kids art: "Art is a process, not a product."  I highly recommend her books if you're looking for some inspiration in your art lessons.

I love this book. So inspiring!

And not only does MaryAnn write books, she also founded her own publishing company, Bright Ring. There are free online resources on Bright Ring's site: excerpts from some of the books, a list of project ideas, links to other websites and blogs, and supplements to Discovering Great Artists. They have a Facebook page as well with links to crafts and funny status updates, for those of you who are in to social media. And MaryAnn also has her own blog. There are a ton of projects posted on there with lots of pictures. She also links to other art blogs for more creative idea resources. This woman has a pretty prodigious output, I must say.

Resources: National Gallery of Art

I'm learning that major art museums usually have awesome websites with tons of free resources. The National Gallery of Art (NGA) is no exception. I don't even know where to start, because there is just so much awesome to write about. They have an excellent site that is very easy to use (would I really recommend anything else?). There's no superfluous icons or visual clutter, it's just simple and to the point. Everything is easily accessible from the front page, you don't have to click through multiple links to get to the good stuff. And the site is definitely full of good stuff.

I'll begin with what first led me to the site: the Children's Video Tour. This page contains 50 short videos about various paintings in NGA's collection. Unfortunately you can't link to any of them specifically or re-post the videos on another site, but I can understand them not wanting to strain their bandwidth that way. I've watched a handful of them and found each one to be engaging, piquing my interest in the painting discussed.

There's more to watch on the Videos and Podcasts page. The videos here are more documentary-like, longer in length, focusing on individual artists, exhibitions, and other areas. You can also listen to various podcasts as well, which include lectures on a wide range of topics, conversations about particular artists, art movements or works in the collection, and insight into the inner workings of the museum.

You can choose from a plethora of online tours, arranged according to artist, art works, and themes. These would be a helpful addition to your curriculum, giving a fuller understanding of art history. The tours are educational and informative without going over your head.

Speaking of educational, the Education page is probably what will pique your interest the most. The Children's Video Tour, NGA Kids, Learning Resources and Classroom links are handily grouped together under the Resources heading. NGA Classroom has online lesson plans and curriculum guides, ranging from art fundamentals to more specific subjects. The Learning Resources page is "a place to borrow, browse, and download more than 300 resources." What's really nifty is they have a free loan program for teachers and homeschoolers! You can request a catalogue to find out all the materials available to for borrowing. If you don't like teaching art or don't think you can do a good job of it, this is for you. Seriously, it's free and from one of the best museums in the country, how awesome is that?!

And NGA doesn't neglect homeschoolers, they have a page specifically for you! There's a little bit of redundancy here, as all the sections I've reviewed are listed on the Homeschool page as well. But I thought it was worth mentioning, because you can bookmark that one page instead of half a dozen.

Your kids might like this last section, since it's aimed specifically at them: NGA Kids. This page is really interesting in that you can make "interactive art online." I found it to be a bit of a visual overload, not as easy to find links as the rest of NGA's website. However, there are a lot of fun activities to be found here, and your kids might like playing around with all the different games.

Another good website to bookmark for further browsing.

Magazine: Arts and Activities

Ask your library to carry it!

I was hanging out at the American Craft Council Library (yet again) the other day and discovered "the nation's leading art education magazine," Arts & Activities. I'd never heard of it before, but after reading this month's issue, I think it's a great publication. They have projects with step-by-step instructions, the grade-level that it's aimed at, skills and knowledge students will gain, lesson plans to go along with it, and follow up ideas to try. It spans pre-K through high school, so I'm sure you could find at least one project to try.

I was impressed by Arts & Activities for several reasons: 1) The projects aren't dumbed down or overly simplified, yet they're explained well and help convey ideas and information about art history--it's not just random "craft time" but has a purpose. 2) I usually am annoyed by ads in magazines, but the ones in Arts & Activities actually caught my attention. The advertisements were for materials that I would use or products that I could see being beneficial in teaching art. 3) The articles are written by teachers for teachers, so the information is coming from real world classroom experience, not just a lesson outline that may or may not pique students' interest.

Their website has a lot of free resources as well: curriculum guides, videos, and online extras that build upon articles from the monthly magazine. You can get the magazine in print or digital form.

Understanding Art History part 1

Any student of art history quickly realizes that every author has a bias and a spin they want to put on things. This can range from benign to fairly insidious. The author who merely wants to draw a bit more attention to a forgotten artist is one thing, but there are writers who filter the history of art through feminist, racial, sexual, revisionist lenses.
Now I'm not saying that we shouldn't focus on female artists or those of other races, but we shouldn't embrace a re-written, politically correct time line. The reason there are so many white males in our western art chronology is because that's who was mainly making art and having an impact on the wider art world. It's pretty likely that there were a lot more women creating art than are in the textbooks...but they didn't have the influence of their male contemporaries until recently in history.
It bothers me that some try to minimize certain artists' accomplishments and influence simply because they were white and male.We should rightly embrace new discoveries and artists that were forgotten but have recently been re-discovered. But we shouldn't discard those who really did have an impact simply because their race and gender isn't popular today. Re-writing art history in the name of tolerance and diversity is robbing students of a true understanding of what actually happened.
Another modern day trend is making too big a deal about an artist's sexuality in relation to their work. Yes, there were and are homosexual artists. But some writers can make sexuality the overarching focus of their study of a particular artist, even if that didn't affect the work in a major way. Authors interpret every single detail through a sexual lens, even when the artist themselves have said differently what their intentions were. Georgia O'Keefe is one such artist whose work has been over-sexualized by later critics. When they've been recorded, reading an artist's own words about the intentions for their work is very important.
Don't simply take someone's word for it merely because they've managed to get a book published containing their opinions.

Art Tip #4: Try something new

Try something different--go outside the box.

It's easy and comfortable to stick with what we know. Trying something you're not familiar with can be awkward, there's more possibility for failure (see Art Tip #1); you might feel stupid as if you should somehow already know how to do this. You have no problem whipping through a lesson on history, helping your kids concoct a science experiment, teaching them reading and writing...but when it comes to art, you're all thumbs and you don't know how to come up with interesting projects.
We can't be experts on everything, dear readers. And making art is not relegated to a few select individuals who can draw a straight line blindfolded.
Like I've said before, just try to have fun and don't over think what you're doing. Just try something new, shake up your status quo.
If you always pull out the colored pencils and drawing paper, try letting your kids play around with some watercolors instead.
A lot of kids like building things with Play Doh, take it one step further with some cheap modeling clay; most craft stores carry the easy bake or air dry varieties.
If your children like drawing, take them to a museum and have them pretend they're apprentices during the Renaissance, learning from the great masters' works.
If you're into sewing, let your kids play around with scraps and thread, let them create something on their own. When I was in junior high, I made some leaf shaped pins out of felt scraps one day just for fun.
If you always visit the same art museum for field trips, go to a different one even if you don't like the art. I really love going to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and I'm not a huge fan of the Walker, but I visit both regularly because it widens my understanding of art. (Just looking at their websites' front pages, you can tell they're very different institutions) And sometimes I'm surprised and discover a piece of art that really inspires me where I least expect to find it.
I could go on, but you get the idea: shake things up, don't settle in a rut.

Art Tip #2: Encourage a mess

Allow and encourage making a mess.

This goes along with my previous post on failure. If things are getting messy, your child is making something and (hopefully) having some fun. Now I'm not advocating paste smeared on the walls and play-doh stuck in the dog's fur, but when the creative juices start flowing things can get a little messy. If art is so regimented and neat-nick that there's no room for error, then there's not really much room for fun either.

Art Tip #1: Failure is good

Failure is a good thing.

Yes, you read that right. Your kids have to be allowed to try something and possibly fail at it. This is true in other areas as well, but especially so in art.

I still distinctly remember one particular art teacher I had at a homeschool co-op when I was little. She would come around, look at students' drawings, and then erase something she didn't think was right and re-draw it! I would get frustrated, because I thought it looked good and then all my hard work was replaced. There's a difference between helping students improve their skills and doing their work for them. What would have been better for this teacher to do: come around to look at the drawings, then suggest ways to improve my drawing myself. A student can't truly learn something if the work is done by someone else.

I didn't understand perspective, scale, shading, proportions when I first put crayon to paper. But I was allowed and encouraged to draw, doodle, paint, cut, paste, build, sew...and through the process of creating I learned. Not everything I made as a 7-year-old and make as a 24-year-old are masterpieces. I try new ideas and they don't always work. And that's okay. I take what I learned and I create again.

Resources: Altered Esthetics' Drawing Night

Altered Esthetics is a gallery in Northeast Minneapolis that I've mentioned before. They're a non-profit art organization that gives many artists their first opportunity to show work in a gallery (myself included). They have monthly art openings, artist talks, workshops, mentor programs for new artists, and more.
One of their new events this year is Suit Up Ae. Every third Wednesday of the month 6:30 - 8:30pm Ae provides an evening of figure drawing. Volunteers dress up in costumes and anyone is free to come and draw for two hours. There is a suggested donation of $3, which is very reasonable. If you have a student who wants to further their drawing skills this is a fun and low key opportunity to do so.
There's just something special about making art in the company of other artistically inclined souls. And there's no comparison to drawing from real life--you can obsess over the details from a photograph ad infinitum, but a model can only hold a pose so long. Life drawing teaches you to focus on the important details and not worry about the little things so much. It can be challenging but it's a lot of fun.

Article: More Drawing Advice Than Anyone Wanted

The artist of a webcomic I follow recently wrote up a great essay about drawing and learning to be yourself as an artist.

"Anyone who has any aptitude at drawing will be asked at some point “how do I learn how to do that?”, and it seems to me that when people care to go into a more elaborate response than “Practice all the time” they are usually advising people to read up on a lot of Hogarth and Loomis, and learn all of the fundamentals before they start trying to get creative. I think one of the best pieces of drawing advice for beginners I ever saw was once upon a time on DeviantArt when Modus Operandi’s artist Tish Doolin told someone that if you were just picking up a pencil and trying this drawing thing out for the first time, it’s going to benefit you more to draw things that you have fun with than struggling with dry fundamentals right out of the gate."

You can read the rest of her post here. It's pretty long, but it's good reading. Expressing yourself artistically takes investing some time and effort into the endeavor. She uses the analogy of learning a new language--you don't expect to be fluent after paging through a few pages of a Spanish textbook, likewise you're not going to be Monet after painting once or twice.

She references and links to several helpful resources, one of which is this essay/tutorial.
I've come across similar guides in the past, but I found this particular one to be very well done and quite informative. It's surprisingly academic (but not in a over-your-head incomprehensible way) in that it's not simply about drawing. To draw well, you have to understand some basic ideas. To draw really well and to own your artistic style, you also have to know some art theory, which is not as scary as it sounds. I've referred to the landmark graphic novel Understanding Comics by Scott Mccloud in the past. This essay paraphrases a lot of his ideas into simpler, shorter form. I'd suggest reading the book for a fuller understanding of symbols and the styles of representation in art.

Resources: Google Art Project

I just found out about an awesome new website from Google. It's called the Art Project and it's amazing. It's like Google Maps but instead of streets and buildings, you can digitally wander around some of the best art museums in the world. I'm really excited about this! Not only can you "walk" through the galleries, you can click on art works to see more detail, zooming in to see individual brush strokes on paintings.
You can search by museum or for a particular piece of art. You can also create your own collections of favorite art pieces that you can then share with others. And you can save close up views as well, if there's a particular part of a work you like or want to show someone else. It's a nice way to set up a lesson plan for your students or browse a museum's collection you might not otherwise be able to see. And please do take advantage of this resource -- some of the most famous works of art in the world are now easily viewable in high resolution for your viewing pleasure.
I found the site extremely easy to use. After watching the intro video and a few minutes playing around, I easily got the hang of browsing through the Art Project. You have to hand it to Google, they know how to design good websites. They've found another good use for their street view technology! The Art Project links to all the museums, so you can easily view more works and find further info on each institution's website as well.
Over 15 museums are currently on board, sharing their art and galleries, and information about the works; more museums will hopefully be added as time goes by. You can read more about the project and see instructional videos here. The Art Project also has a YouTube account that has more videos and links to the museums' videos as well.
Way to go, Google, way to go.

Resources: Kinder Art

Here's another website filled with a breathtaking amount of resources for all your art needs! Kinder Art is definitely for those of you, especially with young children, who want to do art projects but don't where to start or are trying to break through a creative block. There is a huge amount of information available here. Kinder Art has been around for over 13 years, so there's a lot of content to browse. They've got craft ideas, coloring pages, a newsletter, a section specifically for preschoolers, art history lessons, ideas for the performing arts, projects broken down into a variety of mediums. There's the Teacher's Toolbox, which is aimed at those of you just starting out with teaching art and needing some direction. The name of the game here is simplicity in your art education--you don't need over the top projects to teach your kid something.
I've only browsed a small fraction of Kinder Art, but I like what I've seen so far. The only quibble I have with the site, is there's a lot of ads and advertisement links all over. It's a little distracting because there's not enough distinction between the site's content and the ads at times. I do like the face that Kinder Art has a pretty simple page design--this is not a Flash based web site, which takes forever to load on some Internet connections.

Resources: Europeana

In World Magazine's November 6th issue, they published a little blurb about Europeana:
"European museums have banded together to put some of their collections online. More than 6 million digital items from museums including the Louvre in Paris, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the British Libray are accessible through europeana.eu/portal."

The site is currently in its beta phase, so they're still tinkering with the design and ironing out all the glitches. It seems like a pretty simple site at first glance, but there's deep waters to dive into here. Some of Europe's finest museums and libraries have made their collections available for online perusal. For the majority of us who will probably never be able to visit these places, at least we can have access to the vast collections and learn something from them.

You can explore the works through a time line, or search by specific pieces. If you have an account, you can save searches that you make and tag specific pieces, so that you can find easily re-find your favorite works of art. And Europeana doesn't just showcase the studio arts, but music and literature as well.

This site is also a great resource for writing research papers. All the works have the proper academic information attached to them. I don't how many times over the years I've been browsing the Internet, found a cool picture, but there wasn't enough info alongside it to be of any help. You can click on the image to view it at a good quality resolution not just a little thumbnail. You can see who created it, when, where, what museum it's currently housed in, and whether it's in the public domain or copyrighted. 

Europeana also puts together virtual exhibits, drawing on its vast database to make for informative and interesting browsing. One of the current exhibits is about my favorite art movement: Art Nouveau.

Europeana is not be passed up--there's so much information available, and this could help you round out your art lessons.

Resources: Suzanne DeCuir's Art Blog

I saw this blog mentioned in the October issue of The Artist's Magazine. Suzanne DeCuir created her blog as a way to fill in gaps in her art history knowledge. Just browsing through it, there's a lot of good information. Unfortunately, she hasn't posted anything new since June, but there's plenty of articles in the archives.

Resources: Mental Floss Magazine

As it says on my business card, I am a repository of random facts and trivia. I love history, I'm a voracious reader and I like to share oddball tidbits to get a conversation going. Mental Floss is pretty much my favorite magazine to read. Their articles are short and sweet introductions to a variety of subjects with a light-hearted and fun vibe. You enjoy reading the stories so much, you don't even realize you're learning something new! It's a trivia lover's paradise. I particularily like any articles that cover art related topics, obviously. I know a bit about art history, but I always come away with some new information.
Mental Floss has also published a number of books, of which I own Condensed Knowledge. Just check it out from your library, it's fun reading.
I would also recommend Mental Floss' website. There's the Amazing Fact Generator, multiple blogs, articles from past issues, quizzes, and a whole lot more. One feature I just stumbled across is Feel Art Again, where they spotlight different artists and art works.
I definitely suggest picking up an issue of Mental Floss, not simply for art history, but just as a great magazine in general.

Resources: Art 21

Art 21 is my favorite show to watch and re-watch. I always take some new inspiration or idea away whenever I watch it. I was introduced to it by one of my professors at Northwestern College. Each episode focuses on four artists, grouped by a loose theme (ex: memory). I really enjoy watching Art 21, because it helped me learn how to talk about my art. This is what PBS says about their show:
"... the only series on television to focus exclusively on contemporary visual art and artists in the United States, and it uses the medium of television to provide an experience of the visual arts that goes far beyond a gallery visit. Fascinating and intimate footage allows the viewer to observe the artists at work, watch their process as they transform inspiration into art, and hear their thoughts as they grapple with the physical and visual challenges of achieving their artistic visions."

I like hearing artists talk about how they make art and what inspires them. Especially artists whose work I don't understand, it helps me grasp their ideas and look at their art in a new way. I can go from, "That looks weird," to "I still think it looks weird, but now I know why the artist made it look that way." I can appreciate their work even if I don't find it that beautiful to look at.
 
I suggest this show for high school students, as some of the themes, discussions and art can contain mature subject matter. Also, Art 21 is definitely for those with some interest in art and a desire to expand their knowledge of the art world. 

The website for Art 21 also has a lot of resources to make use of. You can watch full episodes online, participate in discussions about the art, and, most importantly of all, they have an education section with lesson plans and project ideas. This section also includes an extensive glossary of terms that are used on the show. I highly recommend taking a look at the site. PBS is awesome for making all this information free and easy to access.

Here's a clip about one of my favorite artists, Julie Mehretu (the Walker has an enormous painting of hers in their collection):

Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.

You can also watch clips on Art 21's channel on youtube. It loads a bit faster than the PBS video player, and it's easier to browse through to select something.

Here's a trailer for season 5:

Resource: Art for Kindergartners

I've got something special for you today. This is a fantastic article from the July/August 2010 issue of Home School Enrichment Magazine. They've given me special permission to repost the entire article here for all you AH! readers.
If you like what you read, please let them know. It's a great magazine with good articles and lots of resources.

Art for Kindergartners

Taking a look at how children develop artistically

By Ruth Beechick

Children’s art development passes through two stages. The first stage is manipulation of the materials. By manipulating, they gradually move into the stage of representation in which they come to represent various items in their drawings. Many teachers believe in letting children creatively develop through those stages. They are called developmentalists. Opposing them are teachers who feel that they must direct the children’s art to help them progress better. Thus two opposing views are 1) creative art development versus 2) directed art.

Creative Art and Directed Art

Children who are allowed to play with the crayons and paints and other art media will try out what they can do with them. One day a child may see a circle he made, put two “eyes” in it, and say. “Look, it’s me,” or, “It’s a man.” This way he gradually moves into the representation stage. At first the drawings represent something accidentally, and he names them after he makes them. Then he more and more often can plan ahead of time for his drawing to represent a man or other object.

Teachers who are developmentalists allow the children to use their own minds and grow creatively in this art ability. They try to stimulate thinking by perhaps a visit to see farm animals, or watch an airplane, or some other experience. But then the children think up their own ways to draw their experience. They may not always do this well, but it comes from their own thinking. It promotes their growth in art ability and their cognitive development as well.

Teachers who think they can direct children’s art growth might after a farm visit hand the children a cow picture to color. Or they might show on the chalkboard how to draw a barn and ask the children to copy that model. These assignments are teacher-directed art.

Research on Creative Art

versus Directed Art

In a research on art development, 5000 children of kindergarten ages 4 to 6 were studied. For a period of two years, half the children copied adult designed models and half followed a program of creative art. Some children who had copied adult models were retarded in their own art progress for the full two years, as compared with the “creative” group. If a child is given only one or two models, he may still make progress in devising his own drawings for other objects. But if he repeatedly works from adult models, there is little opportunity left for his own development in art. In such cases the children tended to become classroom problems because they had difficulty thinking for themselves.

Another experiment with slightly older children was set up to help determine the effects of dictatorial methods of teaching. This research used 250 children of primary ages. All the children had been in a program of creative art, but at the time of the experiment 125 of them were given ten lessons of a restrictive or dictatorial nature, while the remaining 125 continued with their regular creative experiences. The restrictive art lessons consisted of copying drawings from the chalkboard or worksheets, coloring or tracing drawings, following verbal directions to produce drawings, and cutting geometric forms such as a triangle and a square to make a house. In these ways they drew such things as a house, apple, tree, bird, or snowman.

On the eleventh day both groups went to a fire station and on their return to school were asked to make pictures of their experiences. The drawings and paintings of the “creative” group illustrated their observations and personal reactions and were successful in varying degrees, while 44 percent of the “restrictive” group failed to depict the fire station outing at all, but resorted to doing trees and other items in the manner which they had been taught in the previous ten days. Still others in this group regressed to the stage of manipulating the art media, rather than performing at their usual higher stage—that of producing drawings from their own heads.

Hand or Mind

We can’t teach drawing by drilling on the physical skills; it comes from the mind. When Joni Eareckson became a quadriplegic she thought she would not be able to draw anymore. But a therapist told her the drawing skill was not in her hand; it was in her head. With this encouragement, she learned to hold a pen in her mouth and draw the pictures that were in her head. If your children draw ears too large, or if they leave out the trunk of a person and attach legs directly to the head, it is not hand training they need so much as time for the mind to develop more and opportunity to sharpen their powers of observation. One way to sharpen their observation and develop their thinking is through drawing—their way, not ours.

The creative approach to art not only develops the aesthetic nature; it also helps children’s cognitive development. The children who made their own decisions about how to show the fire station trip and who solved the problems in carrying out their plans were more active mentally and were active on a higher mental level than if the teacher had given them a fire truck to color, or had drawn a model station for them to copy.

Here, then, is a dilemma because of our modern habit of using published lessons. A published lesson would end with the fire truck or whatever to color, not a creative activity. A publisher’s staff that understood the creative system once planned lessons to fit the creative approach. All the teacher materials were there as usual, but the lessons did not end with a picture to color. They gave the teacher creative ideas instead, sometimes games or other activities. Or if they suggested art it was the creative kind of assignment.

The staff did not get away with this for long. The publisher wanted to get more money from more student sheets to sell. And the teachers had been brainwashed into thinking the lessons must end with a fire truck to color or other fact from the lesson. They thought that was the “doing” part of the lesson. The children first learned by listening; then they “applied” the lesson with crayon and paper. Moreover, the Sunday school teachers wanted the sheet to say something to parents when it was sent home; it was a message for the parents and not primarily for the students.

So that publisher and his customers went back to the old way. Each week their children bent over a table, crayon in hand, working quietly. Everybody thought that was great education. They loved the “doing” time at the end of the lesson, little knowing that the children’s minds would be growing more if they were planning their own drawing of a fire station or of sheep in a pasture or of whatever was in the lesson.

It might be better if we relied less on art or handwork for academic learning and made more use of games, rhymes, sound stories, conversation, pretending, and other learning activities. In homeschooling, art often is just for art, and not necessarily to help other content learning. Or try it for worship. Children could enjoy the beautiful colors God made. They could express joy in using the hands God gave them. One four-year-old was painting with blue when the teacher said quietly, “God made blue.” “He did?” the child exclaimed with surprise in his voice, and he painted his blue with new vigor. After that, the teacher would not think of pulling the child down to the level needed to complete a directed painting lesson—even with blue.

God created wondrous beauties for man to enjoy, and He created man with an aesthetic side to his nature so he can enjoy them. One of man’s first jobs was to dress the garden and keep it. God’s plan for the tabernacle included elaborate art, for which He gave men the necessary skills. Much of the greatest art in the history of the world is that which was done to the glory of God.

All children, of course, will not grow up to be artists, but all should experience art creatively, especially during the kindergarten and primary years when they are developing through the manipulative and representative stages of art thinking. We give opportunities for children to grow in their language, their muscular coordination, their singing, and numerous other ways. We can let them grow in art as well. 

Dr. Ruth Beechick has taught all elementary grades and has watched many children develop in their art ability.

© 2010 by Ruth Beechick

This article was originally published in the Jul/Aug 2010 issue of Home School Enrichment Magazine. 

Learn more at www.HomeSchoolEnrichment.com