Meaningful Art: A Moment to Reminisce

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.