Dilemmas in Art Education

My months acting as a classroom observer and teaching assistant (and, as of today, an official substitute teacher! MAKING THE MONIES!!) have illustrated to me two divergent trends in art education--the one I am decidedly more familiar with and the one that my host school employs. The latter approach emphasizes technical prowess and "high-brow" artistic endeavors like naturalistic still life drawings and oil paintings of serene landscapes or architectural facades. More often than not, the drawing and painting students turn to Google Images for "inspiration," finding an interesting image and then copying it as accurately as possible on their own canvas. The freshmen in the Art I: Foundations course are taught to draw true verticals and true horizontals, perfect circles and ellipses, and the proper way to create a gray scale and a color wheel.

I want to say this explicitly: This is not a bad way to teach art.

In fact, in many ways, this approach ensures that students of art have a solid foundation on which they can rely when they strike out and attempt more daring, more creative projects in the future. Such a teaching style embraces the most commonly seen and appreciated art forms and there is no fault in an undertaking like that.

That being said, I must say that this approach is not to my personal taste. But for you to understand this sentiment, I guess I'd have to explain a bit of my own artistic background. I can't remember a time when I wasn't drawing. I remember color blocking with crayons in elementary school, "designing" dresses in my sixth grade religion class, and obsessively inventing fantasy heroes, heroines, and creatures in eighth grade Latin. In high school I continuously drew human figures--faces and torsos, mainly; I avoided hands and feet at all costs. Occasionally I used preexisting art or images for my source material, especially in detailing human figures, but most of what I drew sprang from my deeply overactive imagination and my uncanny ability to recall visual minutiae from memory.

It should also be noted that I have a history of disliking formal art instruction. In school, art teachers would occasionally take a pencil and draw on student work to illustrate a point. If this happened to my work, I would be furious for the rest of the day. Also, I refused to take a technical drawing class until I was 19 years old and craving a creative outlet. The use of a "right" and "wrong" judgment system in art drives me crazy. So it shouldn't surprise you that I vastly prefer a creative, self-expressive approach to art.

This approach is sadly lacking here in my class placements.

And I feel like the students would appreciate more creative projects too. They seem disheartened by the technicality of their assignments and they continuously look for the easiest, quickest way to complete the projects and move on to the next thing. I don't think they're making work that they're proud of or that they connect to, which I, as a teaching assistant, find disheartening. All around, it's not the best creative environment.

Stay tuned for my next post--I'll be continuing this discussion by introducing two art education websites and their pedagogical theories and approaches. It'll be so FUN!


Should I leave you with some art? Yes, of course!!

Pencil Alphabets, Dalton Ghetti

This man will blow your mind with his pencil graphite sculptures! See more of Dalton Ghetti's art here.

Early Netherlandish and Surrealist Art

Today the Art History AP class studied a favorite artist of mine--Hieronymus Bosch, an Early Netherlandish painter who lived from 1450-1516. Though Bosch is often studied with other contemporary Flemish painters, he is remarkably individualistic. Of course, he shared his interest in religious subjects with his peers but his approach--both the technique and specific subject matter--was very much his own. The most famous of his works is undoubtedly The Garden of Earthly Delights from ca. 1490-1510.


It is an oil-on-wood triptych meant to be read from left from right. It begins with the left panel, which shows the creation of Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden, moves to the central panel of a... well, an orgiastic paradise... and ends with the right panel, which shows a fantastic imagining of Hell. Let's see some close ups of Hell!


















And, let's not forget to look at the front of the triptych, which can only be seen when the two side panels are folded shut. It depicts the scene from the Book of Genesis in which God creates the earth and Hieronymus Bosch executes it in ghostly grisaille--a style of monochrome painting usually done in shades of gray.


All of these images lead me to the real point and purpose of this post: Man Ray, a modernist artist primarily known today for his surrealist photography and his loose ties to both the Dada and Surrealist movements of the 1930s.


Below: Man Ray, photographed by Lothar Wolleh
1975
After meeting and befriending well-known readymade devotee Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray made a brief foray into such Dada sculptural experiments and created one of his most famous pieces Gift (1921), a flatiron studded with nails. In addition to their exchange of artistic ideas, Ray and Duchamp collaborated on the creation of the Société Anonyme, a portable collection of contemporary art objects, which is now considered to be the first museum of modern art in America. Years later, Ray would work with his assistant and lover Lee Miller to recreate the photographic technique solarization and created a new eponymous technique called rayograms.

Anatomies, 1929

Woman with Long Hair, 1929



Natasha, 1931

And perhaps his most famous photographs:

Le Violin d'Ingres, 1924

Tears, 1930-1932

The dreamlike works of Hieronymus Bosch preceded the works of Surrealism by almost 500 years but his refusal to be bound by the real, tangible world persisted in a way that few artistic trends have in the past. Perhaps their is something universal and timeless in the intrigue presented by the images of the subconscious. Man Ray seems to have thought so for his photographs capture beautiful and ever-elusive realities that intersect with our own in a distant or barely tangential way.

What do you think? Will there be surreal or oneiric art 500 years from now? Why or why not?

The Renaissance and Public Art

Currently, the students in Art History AP are studying the High Renaissance. The art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael often stand alone due to their incomparable beauty and their status as the ultimate portrayal of perfect technical execution. Nevertheless, they also demonstrate important developments in artistic practices that came before the Renaissance and continued to affect the production of art after the Renaissance had faded into the annals of history.

One of these developments is the continuation of public art. The students had already encountered unavoidably in situ art in the form of frescoes--the earliest of which comes from the time of the Minoans, a civilization that spanned from the 27th to the 15th century BC.


(I love this fresco. It looks like a Dr. Seuss illustration!)

Frescoes continue throughout time as the go-to medium for public art and the artists of the Renaissance utilize this style of painting in order to create some astonishing masterpieces. The early Renaissance master, Giotto, used fresco to illustrate scenes from the Old Testament in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy.

Lamentation
Giotto, 1305

But Michelangelo does the unprecedented in his creation of the Last Judgment fresco in the Sistine Chapel...

The Last Judgment
Michelangelo, 1535-1541

But why is the medium of fresco relevant today? What is the current status of public art?

There is a current and undeniable trend in public art that favors the temporary, the ephemeral, and, often, the socially conscious. These elements combine and come to bear in the budding forms of street art. Street art includes but is certainly not limited to traditional graffiti, stencil art, sticker art, wheatpasting, video projection, guerrilla art, and street installations. Because many forms of street art are considered vandalism and are thus illegal, many street artists create designs that are temporary in nature and often require very little time to execute.

Some street artists, however, have become incorporated into the mainstream and work for corporations and private clients. One such artist is a chalk artist (creatively) known as Chalk Man. He is very much an artist inspired by the tenets espoused by Renaissance artists, especially those of realistic perspective and effective trompe l'oeil, a French phrase meaning "to deceive the eye."

Above: Hell
Right: Alice

Keep in mind: These chalk drawings are on flat, two-dimensional surfaces! How's that for deceiving the eye?

Another well-known contemporary street artist is Shepard Fairey, especially noteworthy for his "André the Giant Has a Posse" or "...OBEY..." project and his stunning Barack Obama campaign poster.


Shepard Fairey reworked this image in a clever and somewhat blasphemous way for Showtime's Emmy award winning television show Dexter, a police drama about a blood spatter analyst who moonlights as a serial killer.


But it is the (in)famous street artist Banksy who gives the greatest nod to the public religious works of the Renaissance fresco masters. How does the work below engage with the history of public art? What commentary does it offer? And how is its public nature important to the message it sends?


Let me know what you think! Leave a comment!

Jasper Johns and the Gray Scale

Ms. J's Foundations class has moved beyond the line! And they have moved onto something even more exciting--the gray scale!

If you don't know already, this is a gray scale:


And making one is significantly more difficult than you might imagine. The students mixed black and white acrylic paint over and over and over again until they created a great enough variety of pigments to make a successful gray scale.

But where does an art class go from here? Once we have a mastery of monochromatic gradation, how do we apply it to personal creation?


For inspiration, we need to look no further than the works of this man--Jasper Johns. Jasper Johns is a American artist, born in 1930, who works primarily in painting and printmaking. His art most notably incorporates images from popular culture, especially Americana iconography like the American flag and maps of the United States.

The Foundations art class, however, is using his monochromatic paintings of numbers, letters, and other stenciled signs for their primary inspiration.




Some of these pieces feature one large subject:





















Other works like this are more complex:

Jasper Johns
Jubilee, 1959

Jasper Johns
Map, 1962

With these images in mind, the students have begun to design their own Jasper Johns-inspired pieces and prepare to utilize the gray scale to make those designs come to life!

Teaching Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party"

The Dinner Party
Judy Chicago, 1974-1979

I decided to mix things up.

So I began observing a 6th grade class and a 7th grade class.

They are NOT like high school students. And they really, really like Justin Bieber. It is UNCOMFORTABLE.

Anyway. The middle school art teacher, Mr. E., is starting a new project with his 6th grade class based on Judy Chicago's famous installation piece The Dinner Party, a beautiful conceptual work meant to comment upon and remedy the absence of women in modern historical consciousness. The triangular table features 39 place settings--complete with personalized tablecloths and plates as well as silverware and a goblet for each guest. There are 13 settings on each side of the triangle and these sides are representative of different historical eras. The first side spans prehistory to the Roman Empire; the second spans the beginnings of Christianity to the Reformation; and the final spans the Age of Revolution. The students in Mr. E.'s class examine examples from Judy Chicago's piece and discuss the impact that her guests made on women's rights.

Here are some examples from the table:







Emily Dickinson















Virginia Woolf
















Georgia O'Keefe












Then the students get to select their own guests and create a personalized plate and place setting for the new addition to the table. Students from past classes have invited women like Oprah Winfrey, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Gaga, and, the founder of the school, Florence Baldwin.


Who would you invite?

The Importance of the Line and Engraving

Recently, Ms. J. has been teaching a unit to demonstrate the importance of the line to her Art Foundations class. As one might imagine, the line is the basis of and the primary building block for many, if not most, artistic endeavors. In order to teach the line, Ms. J. begins with the notion the of gesture--a movement meant to convey an idea or emotion. Students draw a single curvilinear line, which takes up most of their paper, and then draw over the line again and again and again until they accumulated layers of graphite/charcoal that sweeps the original line into an evocative gesture. Additionally, the layered lines create areas of light and dark, which starts to indicate the existence and effects of value.

The students go on to draw true verticals, true horizontals, and diagonal lines. Then they combine these elements to create two-dimensional renderings of three-dimensional objects. They practice cubes and then draw a box from observation... This has mixed results. And is accompanied by very little enthusiasm. Overall, the students are unimpressed by work at the easels. They frequently seem bored and they continually try to abandon their easels to find their friends to talk and gossip. Alternatively, they enjoy "secretly" texting. (Note: Rarely, if ever, are the students actually deft enough to text in secret. It's obvious and they should either brush up on their deception skills or abandon the entire endeavor.)

Sadly, the students don't seem aware of the fact that lines are actually fantastic things, capable of constructing unbelievable works of art. In particular, lines assist engravers and more contemporary artists like illustrators. Let's introduce some examples!

First, engravers, the linear predecessors of illustrators:

Left: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Albrecht Dürer, ca. 1497-98, Woodcut

Right: Knight, Death, and the Devil
Albrecht Dürer, 1513-14, Engraving

If you're going to talk about engraving, you have to talk about Albrecht Durer. Born in Nuremberg, Germany in 1471, Albrecht Dürer became a painter, engraver, and printmaker as well as a mathematician and theorist; he is widely regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance. In particular, his command of composition and value are awe-inspiring. And because of the mediums he worked in, he possessed an unbelievable command of line.

The Italian engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi also utilized line beautifully. In addition to using line to add value in his engravings, Piranesi's lines create complex and even sublime compositions too. He particularly demonstrates this ability in his Carceri series--a group of images depicting terrifying and fantastical prisons.

Carceri Plate XIV - Carceri d'invenzione
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ca. 1745

Does that image look familiar? Remind you of M.C. Escher, maybe?

M.C. Escher
Relativity, 1953

But what about illustrators? I did mention them, didn't I? Yes I did! And here I'll mention two of my favorites--one who seems to have been influenced by Dürer and another who seems to have a much closer affinity to Piranesi and Escher. First, there is Gustave Doré, a French engraver and illustrator who was born in 1832 in Strasbourg, France. He was commissioned to execute numerous illustrations for literary texts including, but certainly not limited to, Dante's Inferno, Cervantes's Don Quixote, and Poe's The Raven.

Left: Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno: Schismatics-Mahomet
Gustave Doré, 1857

Right: The Holy Bible - The Deluge
Gustave Doré, ca. 1866

I admit it--those are pretty brutal images. But they are also beautiful for the pristine engraving technique and the use of value and light. Let's lighten this up with a work by our second illustrator, Sir John Tenniel, the famous visual genius behind Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass.

Alice in Wonderland

Sir John Tenniel, 1865

See! Lines are amazing!

So I hope that in spite of their inevitable early teen blasé attitudes, the 9th grade Arts Foundation students eventually realize how wonderful lines can be!

Thematic Assignment: Mind-Map

Today Ms. J. gave the Art History AP class a new homework assignment. They are to go to (this really amazing website) http://bubbl.us and create a thematic mind-map of four inter-related artworks. First, the students must choose a theme. Thus far, themes have included male form, female form, sacred spaces, political art/propaganda, images of war/violence, patronage, class structure, narrative, portraiture, symbolism/allegory, funerary monuments, etc. After the select, the students must pick four examples to illustrate their chosen theme. One example must come from the Gothic period, one from the 20th century, one from outside the "Western canon," and one may be any piece the student wants.

I selected "Female Form" as the theme for my mind-map and this is what I created:

I think that this bubble chart is sort of magical. But that's just me. And, of course, you can't read it. So I'll summarize here:

1) Gothic example: Virgin of Paris

2) 20th century example:

The Broken Column, Frida Kahlo

3) Non-Western Example:

Bust of Nefertiti, Egypt

4) Free Example: 19th century
Olympia, Edouard Manet

... I can't tell you how difficult it was to format this post. Luckily, it's full of great images, which all offer interesting commentary on femininity and ideals of beauty throughout the history of art!