Creativity Part 1

Last month, I spent a couple weeks teaching part of a Master's of Education class on creativity. I had my wonderful, adult students, working on collaborative art projects, going on visual scavenger hunts with iPads, creating dance moves to represent and sequence parts of a day or event, and visually interpreting contrasting pieces of music. It is a treat for me to hear fellow teachers of children tell me that I've given them something they will use to engage their students and teach the curriculum.
We live in a time when creative thinking is crucial in solving the enormous problems in government, the environment, industry, and complicated family lives. Today's students need to know how to see situations with new eyes and find answers to the big questions and seemingly insurmountable dilemmas in their future. They can learn creative problem solving skills through unstructured play, hands on activities, experimentation, exploration of the natural world, and the arts. We do students a great disservice when we base our classes around high stakes multiple choice tests and worksheets where only one answer is accepted. They need to find possibilities that have not yet been imagined. We all do.
As a special education art teacher, I find myself having to find answers for every student's unique set of disabilities. Throughout my day, I ask myself:  How can I teach observational drawing to an elementary student who is completely blind? How do I have a discussion with a child who has autism and is non-verbal? How can I help a student with cerebral palsy to hold a pencil? How do I invite cooperation from an angry high school student who is refusing to work?  We all have our daily challenges, which turn into daily victories when we play with possibilities and seek inspiration from wherever we can find it.
When my oldest son was eight, we visited an art exhibition and I asked him where he thought artists got their ideas. "Artists get their ideas from everywhere. From the world around them," he said. He was right. The best ideas come from outside oneself. A single paragraph from from a novel, (about music being recognized as a written language by a passenger on a train), was the jumping off point for my husband to make more than a decade's worth of collages, prints, and paintings. The computer mouse is inspired by roll-on deodorant. Inspiration can come from unlikely sources.
In Elizabeth Gilbert's popular Ted Talk, "Your Elusive Creative Genius" she talks about ancient Greece and Rome, when people believed that divine spirits came to offer creativity. She said, "The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons. Socrates, famously believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar."
"So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame," she said.
In the Middle Ages, the idea that the individual human was the center of creativity came to be accepted. 
"And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error," Gilbert continued, "I think that allowing somebody one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smudge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just complete warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance."

Twenty years ago, Baltimore based artist, Claudia Matzko, explained a concept to Ohio State graduate students, that sounded even more cosmic than she would have liked it to sound, none the less, it was this:  There are ideas floating around, and it's your job as an artist to catch one. If you don't catch it, someone else will.
As writers, it's not such an "out there" idea. Plenty of us have had brilliant and original book ideas only to find someone else beat us to the publisher with the same idea. My brother was a little kid, freezing chocolate pudding into ice cube trays with toothpicks for handles, to sell to neighborhood friends years before Jell-o started selling pudding pops. Maybe ideas, answers, inventions, and melodies are just hanging in the universe waiting for an artist, waiting for anyone to notice. And it is up to each of us to catch the ideas and do something with them to make the world better and our lives more interesting. 
We also have to allow our children to engage in creative play and seek inspiration. We must offer them problems with opened ended solutions, and model how to think through possibilities. But before we model for others, we must learn to do those things ourselves. Play. Ponder. Listen to your muses. Catch some ideas and make something unique!

Hypertufa Pots

When my horticulture teacher coworker, Keith Blackwell, suggested I teach how to make hypertufa for summer camp, I asked, "hyper what?" Turns out this is the stuff that those stone looking bird baths and Japanese lanterns are made from. I've seen some really beautiful gardens of hypertufa pots and planters and since our camp theme this year was "Down on the Farm" I thought planting and harvesting appropriate craft projects were perfect for art class.

There are many recipes online and all of them give ratios. I used:
one part Portland Cement
one part Peate Moss
one part sand
one part Vermiculite (not really, it was more like 1/4 or 1/2 of the other stuff)

So when I ordered the ingredients I got the same number of pounds, which was a huge mistake because 100 pounds of the cement was not nearly as many cups or (bowls or whatever you are using to scoop to be considered one part) of Peate Moss, so I ended up with tons and tons of that left over. In fact, for 30 campers, I used about 97 pounds of cement and about the same of sand, but only maybe 1/3 of a 50 pound bag of Peate Moss. Students scooped and counted while wearing their latex gloves and dust masks. You don't want to get the powdered cement in your lungs because the moister is what turns it to mortar and that's not good to have in your body. We used a wheel barrow and worked in groups of 9 students at a time, pouring water and mixing with their hands. You want it to be able to hold together, but not be runny.

Then we pressed the mixture into the insides of old plastic planters, 6in round or square ones worked well. You can use old yogurt container,s milk cartons, or whatever inspires you to form a mold. I tried using mosaic tiles in the tops of one pot, but need some more practice, as some fell out when it dried.

Two days later we popped the hardened containers out of the plastic containers and let them finish drying for another day. I think ideally, a week or two would be needed so that it can cure, but a day or two is perfect if you want to carve a design or sand the outside to smooth it out.

Be sure to find a plant that works with your new pot. We poked a small hole in ours, but I'm not sure that's necessary since the Peate Moss should help absorb some extra moisture if the container is large enough. It's a learning process, but so far, so fun!

photo credit for plant pics to Keith Blackwell

Basket Weaving at Camp for the Blind

The week after post-planning for teachers, I taught Art, including basketry, at a special camp for middle and high school students who are blind or visually impaired. Basket kits for weaving baskets are expensive, and frankly, end up looking like kits, so I decided we'd just buy the reed and start from scratch.

Weaving works because the under, over, pattern alternates based on an odd number of reeds from which to weave. I started by cutting 4 flat reeds of the same length and one half the length. I used twine to start the weaving pattern with the half length joining in as the 9th spoke.

After enough twine is used to fill in the tiny gaps, and add some stability to the frame, round reed can be used to weave. The smaller the size of the reed, the smaller the number. So if you buy round reed 1 or 2 or 3, it will be very easy to soak in water and bend around corners. I think we used size 2. Pull it tight each round and push it against the previous circle for a stronger basket. After finishing one reed, simply add another, and tuck the ends in as you go. 

 Because the reeds come rolled up, there will be some curve, which helps with the shape of the basket. Students pulled tighter for a taller, thinner, shape, or flatten it for a wider shape. Once the body is the right size, students soaked their baskets, bent the flat reads inward, and tucked them into the round, woven reeds. We held them in place with clothes pins until drying.

I was so surprised at which students were able to pick up the weaving process quickly. With enough practice, this could be a viable career path (craft shows or online store) for students with no vision. There was a lot of enthusiasm among kids as they went from telling me, "The struggle is real," to "I got this!" On the end of camp survey, basket weaving was listed more than any other activity as something new that was learned at camp. It was well worth the $3 of materials for students to have the experience and take home something to be proud of.

 I had a couple good volunteers, doing the prep work of cutting the flat reeds. My son, Jonah is on the left.

Memory Pots

I wanted something special for each of my students who was graduating, so I made several memory pots. First I went through digital pictures of field trips, projects, and happy classroom moments.

I printed them from the computer, cut each one out, and decoupaged it to a terra-cotta pot. This is a very simple process of painting the pot quickly with Mod Podge, sticking the pictures in place and then painting Mod Podge on top. It will look white at first, but dries clear. It seemed to work better if the pictures were small and positioned at an angle, although, I'm sure larger images would be fine as long as they were tapered at the bottom to avoid wrinkling. I used 6" pots and it took 5 or 6 pictures that were about 3-4" wide.

I used paint pens to decorating the rim, and then the horticulture teacher planted a flower in each pot so the gifts could be from both of us. I ended up spending about $3.00 per student. I hope it will bring back memories of things learned and shared during our last several years together. Next time you can't think of what to give for Mother's Day, Father's Day, Secretary Appreciation Day, or birthdays etc, give this a try and wait for the smiles.

Animal Zentangle

There's room for originality, even when there's lots of boundaries. For example, this art assignment seems to limit subject matter to animals (but there are thousands of different kinds of animals), color (you are free to choose any color you like, you just need to stick to it), and requires the use of pattern (but there are an infinite number of patterns that can be created).

To warm up, each student started by dividing a sheet of paper into at least 8 organically shaped spaces, and then they filled each space with a different pattern. This gets the juices flowing on possibilities.

To create the animal drawing, these students picked an animal image from the internet, and transferred it to a piece of paper. They did this by either tracing it on a light box or coloring the back of the print out with pencil and then tracing the front of the print out so that the graphite would be deposited onto the paper under it. For those who were blind, I traced an image for them and outlined it with hot glue. Then they could draw their pattern within a tactile space.

It's not a ground breaking, soul searching kind of assignment, but it does help students see that pattern makes things a little more interesting, and they can incorporate that into future projects.

The Sets Take Center Stage

This month, my school performed the musical, "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown!' which was perfect since there are only 6 parts and we have a very small school.

The sets were ambitious since we only had a few people working on them. Linus and Lucy's big sofa was built with a wooden frame, and long "D" shaped cardboard tubes for the "ears". We covered it felt.

An extra tall Charlie Brown meant needing an extra tall mailbox.

Snoopy sang some songs from the top of his dog house.

And of course, Lucy draped herself over Schroeder's piano for her big solo.

It was fun to see the final show and know that our sets helped make it all a success.

Student Spring Art Shows

Art is meant to be shared and students make better art if they know there's a chance each piece will have an audience. Besides, it is an art standard for students to learn how to display their work. I start putting the best work from each student aside, at the beginning of the school year, so that I there is always enough to put together a show or enter student work in competitions. In the past we had an annual student art exhibit, but this year, we had three shows, two in the Spring:  March….

...and May. Rather than buying frames, I reuse the frames around the school that have been holding the same student work as long as anyone can remember (including people who have been there for 15 years).

I am trying to swap out 1/3 of the frames each year so that every 3 years there is a fresh body of work by current students. I think it's important for current students to feel that they are a part of the school with contributions to make.