Some years ago I
ran art workshops for the toddlers and preschoolers of our centre. We
worked through so many concept blocks, revelling in so many delicious
artistic discoveries. I carefully collected up pieces from each block
as we went, and at the end of the year we put them all up as a
gallery exhibition for the setting of the centre AGM.
It was amazing.
One of the things
I loved about the exhibition was that no two pieces were the same.
Every series of explorations was open to the children's own
expressive whims.
It began with what
little remained of our Space Ship. Any parent or educator can
understand the joy and potential offered by a cardboard box. This was
a particularly huge box which we'd painted white, then decorated,
then built our resources for: blaster rockets, space suits, control
panels, even drawings of imagined aliens. The box was loved to death
over 3 months after its creation. By the end of the year all we'd
salvaged was a great many photos, our weekly documentation of the
journey, several drawings and two astronaut 'backpacks'.
I love offering
children authentic art materials. There's something about working on
a real canvas with some thought-provoking inspiration that brings out
the best in children's art.
For this series we
had a few real canvases, a few squares of rubber backed calico
stretched in an embroidery hoop, and a few squares of rubber backed
calico stapled around a sheet of cardboard. Real art materials don't
have to cost you a fortune, it's often just a matter of thinking a
little sideways.
Our director had
been gifted with a beautiful bunch of flowers in a wooden box-like
pot for the first of my workshops, and she let me borrow it for the
children. It takes a bit of practise to mix up the approximate right
colours, but I really recommend making the effort (the value of this
will become apparent in one of the following series).
For an emphasis on
process more than product: a mirror with a collection of treasures
(with a collection of our play with chromatography).
This one was one
of my favourite workshops. I began by reading 'Where the Wild Things
Are'.
This
is where we see the potential of having paint mixed to the right
colours. I mixed the paint to the colours Maurice Sendak
used in his illustrations. I also want to show the joy of 'monsters'
as an inspirational material: There. Is. No. Wrong. I had the
children sketch out their monster first, then gave them the selection
of colours to work in. It was also important that they work at an
upright easel, standing up to draw. Hopefully I'll get the chance to
go into this in more depth in another post, but this really opens up
the creative potential of the artist.
One
of my favourite elements from this was a moment of 'happy accident'.
A happy accident in art is where you make an unexpected and often
dramatic mistake, and looking at the results inspires you to
something new. In this workshop a child made their own happy accident
with a drip of paint, which became a yoyo string for his monster.
Every
monster had a story and I made a deliberate effort to record those
stories.
“Mine's
a scary monster. It's got a black yo-yo with a line going to it.”
“Hey
look, he's holding a string. I drew a line going down. Mine has a
funny tail.”
“Mine's
a spotty monster and it's got stripes, zebra stripes. And look at its
mouth! It's got scary gnashing hands.”
“This
is a basket full of yummy food that my monster likes to eat. This
monster eats rabbits and cats and sticks and bananas.”
The
next week we made monster masks. Very few of those survived but we
managed to include a few in the exhibition, and we made a few extras
for children to explore whilst viewing their exhibition.
The
next series for the exhibition explored scale and transparency.
I
love overhead projectors. Completely love them. And so do the
children.
We
explored shadows, scale, and how the ohp flipped images. The children
found it hilarious that their hand shadow was ginormous in comparison
to my hand on the wall.
We
drew on ohp transparencies, projected our images up on the wall,
flipped them and played with them, then painted them on this new huge
scale.
For
the exhibition I recreated some of these adventures for children to
revisit with their parents.
In
our block on textiles we made flour dough 'resist' for doing our own
batik painting. It was hard work, but we produced something beautiful
over a few workshops. We also arranged our own patterns of fabric pieces inside embroidery hoops for a beautiful hanging element.
Sadly
I can't share many of the photos from these
workshops as they show children's faces. I sincerely wish I could so
you could see their intense focus, the thought, the intention they
put into their creative works.
This
shot show the children's own photography:
Many
of the parents were surprised when I pointed out that the children
had taken those photos.
And
the children loved their exhibition:
So
did the parents. We had an amazing turnout for the AGM too.
My time can be a little crazy, so these blog entries are highly irregular, but I do have a few thoughts bubbling around at the moment that I'm interested in sharing over time.
