We-Make-Marks: October 2012

In order to get the First, Second and Third Graders warmed up to painting for the year, I gave them a class of Free Paint, where they are free to paint whatever they want. What happens with Free Paint however is that the kids are so familiar with Free Draw, which we always find some time to do at some point in the week, that they draw with the paint. This method works well will some students but many have a hard time coping with the fact that paint is harder to control than marker or crayon. Their drawings look messy, they get frustrated, and ultimately wasteful, with their time and the materials...

This year I needed them to start understanding paint in a different way. Instead of always drawing with the paint, to represent "things and stuff", we spoke about how sometimes painting can just simply have movement and feeling.

In order to demonstrate this I first showed the students a short film that I felt communicated this idea. This Anonymous film is a version of the the famed "Serpentine Dance", originally performed by the world renowned Loie Fuller, a pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting at the turn of the 19th century. This film is hand painted and dated back to1900.

I showed the film twice. The second time I asked the kids to see if they could find any connections to images they were already familiar with... flower!, ocean!, butterfly!, cloud!, fire!, tornado!, wind!, jellyfish!, they exclaimed.

Then we took a look at a slideshow with about forty images of Abstractions done by Georgia O'Keefe. After the watching the film it was easy for the kids to see movement in these paintings, as well as some of the imagery they had also spotted in the dance (fire, waves, etc..)

Now even though I prompted the kids with the idea of painting with movement and feeling I was still giving them Free Paint time so that they could paint whatever and however they pleased using what hey had seen, or not... here are some images of us painting as well as a few of the final outcomes of this Free Paint session.

After getting all of our painting muscles warmed up, the next thing we needed to do was see how we could use them all together. For this assignment we played a game that I described as "musical chairs meets freeze dance, with painting, and no one gets out". Each easel started with three cups of different colored paint and a mark already made (by me) somewhere on the paper. When the music started you were allowed to add to the painting, but the rule was that you must start by touching the already existing mark and you were not allowed to cover any marks. We wanted to be able to see every mark that was made on the painting.

When the music would start the students would paint.......for about 50 secondssss......thennn...FREEZE! Music stops. You look down and choose one of the three colors in front of you to take with you, then move one painting to your right to wait for the music to start again. Once the music starts you can begin painting, touching an existing mark without covering any.......................FREEZE! Music stops. Choose a color to take along with you and move to the next painting to wait until the music starts again....and so on...

The idea was to get each student to make a mark, and participate, in each painting. Therefore the paintings would belong to all of us and none of us at the same time. I needed each student to approach each painting and appreciate what it offered, then be able to ADD TO what was already there.

I need the students to ADD TO instead of TAKE AWAY, this is why I ask them to paint right up next to each others marks without covering them up.

I have done projects like this before and when I don't make the "no cover up" rule it is pretty amazing how many students will disregard the work that was done before them and cover it up just because they can.

In my opinion the paintings they made together were far more interesting and dynamic than most of the Free Painting they did on their own.

Though these new paintings were pretty incredible,We needed to really take a good look at them, to really investigate what we had made together and what the paint had been able to do. Though we had established that these paintings didn't belong to anyone in particular, each student received one painting to take ownership of. Now that each painting belonged to someone what we needed to do was to really show what was happening in these paintings..... Using only black and a white oil pastels we showed that we saw shapes, textures, patterns, movement...