Thursday, April 7, 2011

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.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

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?