Saturday, March 21, 2015

Visit 10: Presenting Collages and Folded Paper

Here are some of the student's finished collage works. Today they presented on their pieces. They talked about their inspirations for their work and what they liked about what the had made.



Some students were not finished at the beginning of class so they worked while others presented. As each one finished they got up to show their piece. 

When they finished with their collages I had them work on a short paper folding project. Only some students finished early so I had them work in a group. They worked together to find ways to use paper to make three dimensional objects. One student knew how to fold a origami flower and she taught that to her fellow students. 

Friday, March 13, 2015

Visit 9: Continuing Collage

Today was a work day for the students. I helped them focus in on their ideas and gave them individual advice on how to move forward in their work. Here are some of the in process shots from the second day of working on this project. Some students really embraced the layering effect in their collages.



Others opted to cover more area on their papers and space out their mages.







Friday, March 6, 2015

Visit 8: Collaging True Statments

For their final assignment we worked with collage. I gave them three days to work on this project so they would have more time to create a finished product. We began by talking about three very different collage artists.

Mark Bradford


Arturo Herrera


Rebecca Plestch


I then showed them some artists who incorporate text into their work that are working in mediums other than collage.

Jenny Holzer


Doug Atiken


Jung Lee

The assignment gave the students was to create a collage that said something that they thought was true. Either a message they wanted to write out in words like the text artists or curated images that represented an idea they believed in. These are some of the beginnings of their work.

 




Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Visit 7: Non-Tradditional Materials Collaboration

I switched out post-it notes for plastic forks and the students worked on making finished sculptures. I had them work in groups of 2-4. They spent the whole time working on the project. 




Some groups had trouble sticking to a single idea and ended up making and remaking about three or four different tideas within the hour.



Boats were a common theme.




As were flowers.



There were also a few that seemed totally abstract. 



Friday, February 20, 2015

Visit 6: What is art? Experimenting with 3-D materials


On the sixth visit we talked about what art is and how artists use non-traditional materials. I asked the students how they would define art. They generally agreed that art was something creative that expressed your feelings. I told them that some people have different definitions of art and that throughout history there have been many arguments about what art is. We discussed two works that have been seen differently over time based on culture changes and that they could still been seen in different lights today.We talked about Vincent Van Gough's Stary Night. 
Today it is revered but in his time it was seen as poor painting. Today people who value emotions in painting respect Van Gogh's work highly. However, formalists might argue that it is a lesser painting for trying to be emotional and depictive. We then went back to the greek pottery we had learned about before.

 
I pointed out that some people do not see anything functional as art where as the greeks used these pots everyday and made no distinction between art and craft.
I then asked if art has to be made by the artists to be art. We talked about installation art with Tara Donovan and Dan Steinhilber.

Tara Donovan Dan Steinhilber
I told them that often installations are done by museum workers and that the artist sends the plans for the work but does not physically create it.

We then examined the materials used by Donovan and Steinhilber. The students where shown many pieces of these artists' work and asked to guess what material was being used in each. We talked about the cheapness of the materials used and how what you do with materials can transform them.






With the remaining time students were challenged to make as many different thing as they could out of plastic straws and post-it notes. They were going to use these materials the next time and they need to figure out how to attach them, how to change their shapes, and what other materials they could use in order to make a sculpture the next time.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Visit 5: Watercolor Forrests

For my fifth visit to Mrs. White's class I helped the students finish paintings of aspens that they started with her earlier this semester. I talked with students about creating dimensionality by curving the horizontal marks on the tree bark and painting one side of the tree darker and the other lighter depending on the position of a light source.