Overview of the Project

This semester I am teaching children how to create a mixed media painting from their experiences in the park.  This is a large project involving over 350 children and multiple visits to a local city park.  The project is called, "Urban Park from the Eyes of Children".

The objective of this project is to invite children to recreate their own personal experience through the use of reference material collected while on site.  Their experiences will be told through painting, drawing, writing and collage.  This is a sophisticated project in the manner that it requires children to experience a place, be aware of what they experience and then to later, create an impression of this experience in the studio.

River divides the city

This project arose out of my personal art practice of doing urban landscape.  There is an element of fantasy and imagination in my cityscape paintings, rather than an exact recording of what I saw or what the camera captured while visiting a city.  Check out Big City living gallery. 

I record my experiences through journalling, photographs, sketching and collecting momentos. Later, I create a painting using my record of the on site visit as reference.  The viewer gets a look into how I experienced a place rather than a cold view of the city. No one can repeat my paintings, they are unique to my experience.

This is what I am hoping will be the result of this project with the children.  Through multiple methods, the children will record their experiences in the park and later in the classroom, I will help the children to use their recordings as references in creating their own unique painting.  

The children need a lot of room for exploration and self-expression.  We need to help them to continually find new inspiration from the park and to help them find ways to record what they find interesting.  'Seeing' what is around us in a clear enough fashion to record it, is an important skill for an artist.  It takes a lot of practice.  Because children are just learning this skill, we may often see wild examples of fantasy and exaggeration while they recollect their visit to the park.  We have to accept this deviation from what is 'real' in order to get a true interpretation of the children's experiences.

Children have a lot to teach the world and they can often do this best through creative expression.  As a teacher I have to resist the desire to help shape their paintings to something that is more 'real' or 'correct'.  The process of learning to record and later to reference recorded material to create an entirely different thing - is a learned skill that is perfected throughout life.

It is my job in this project to help the kids and teachers, to throw the long rope from the island of research across to the island of self-expression through mixed media.   Children, much like adults, do not all learn the same way, so this link needs to be drawn in multiple exercises.  In the end, children will have learned that collected research can then inspire a completely different painting that expresses their experiences in far more depth than any realistic drawing could do.

Children draw fantasy with natural ease.  It is helping them to recognize the importance of their research in the final interprutation that is a challenge.  Some children will see this link easily and other will need a few more exercises and a few more different attempts within different projects, over the years.  That is ok too. 

I will keep you updated through 'Art tips' in Burst and Bloom.  Subscribe to the RSS feed to see each entry.

Comments

[cheese]

my class did this!

[Jacqulynn]

Great to hear from you! I hope you enjoyed the project.