Word Mandala

Mandalas are repeated patterns using radial balance. They are used in some Indian religions and ancient architecture to symbolize the universe.

After my 12 year-old daughter came home with the painting above, I had my own students create mandalas. First I  folded a square of 12" X 12" paper in fourths to make 4- 4"X4" pieces and then diagonally to make 8 identical triangles. I cut them out and gave one to each student. They wrote a name or word that was meaningful to them. (My daughter's says "APPLES.") This can be done with the bottom of the word against the longest side of the triangle or one of the shorter sides, but the letters should fill the space. The word needs to be traced with marker so that it can be seen well enough to trace. We used a light table to trace the word into one section of paper and then flip upside down on the next section and trace it again.The flipping and tracing continued the entire way around the paper. Some people might want to do every other space with the word reading correctly, and then flip the word upside down and fill in the mirror images in the missing spaces. Either way, the results are the same: 4 mirrored pairs of the word.



For my students who are completely blind, and read Braille, instead of print, I wrote the word for them and traced it in hot glue. Their job was to color them using the tactile lines.

These two say "Kind" and "Faith." 

I wish I had taken pictures of the finished pieces because they looked fantastic. This project really helped students who felt like they couldn't come up with a pattern or design themselves, realize that they could. It also helped some of my students think about negative space, and find ways to repeat color for sense of wholeness.

Unity and Variety in Art

E pluribus unum. Out of many, we are one. It's true for a great nation and true for a great class.

I started this school year, a couple weeks ago, by trying to create a sense of community in the classroom, so I asked students to talk about the things we have in common. We all live in the same state, spend our days in the same school; we all like music, on and on. Then everyone shares something about themselves that makes them unique. They each have something special to offer the group and it helps when they recognize it and say it out loud. We listened to each other's favorite songs, and looked specifically for repetition in the music and how it unifies the piece. Then we listen again for variety and how the words are changed up or a bridge is added to make it more interesting. This is how it works in visual art as well. Repetition is one way to create a sense of unity in a painting or sculpture. Variety within the repetition makes it interesting. We chose to spend an entire week focused on making circles. One shape, repeated again and again would be pretty boring except that we made them with a variety of sizes, colors, and decorated with different patterns.



We ended up cutting out half of the circles to make a collaborative art piece on the hallway bulletin board. The words, "Our commonality unites us. Our diversity strengthens us," were in the center in print and braille, along with the art standard which requires that each student "Discusses and applies concepts such as...variety within repetition." Empty toulle spools were used to make some of the circles pop out from the board, at varying depths. The students stapled circles, while I hot glued spools and they were pretty pleased with the results. Here is to a year of unity and cooperation among my art students, and to finding the common ground to unify us as a nation and as human beings.

Creativity Part 2: Work, Play, Rest

I'm always surprised when I see articles that suggest that every creative person procrastinates or that real artists get up before the sun. In truth, great minds are not all alike. They are vastly different. Every one has to find what works best for them, so it is with humility that offer three suggestions to become more creative, which you can feel free to take with a grain or two of salt. It is these: Work hard, play hard, rest hard.

WORK HARD
Pablo Picasso said, "Inspiration does exist but it must find you working." He should know, he was forever working and getting new ideas. 
So my first suggestion to anyone who wants to do creative work, is to show up and do the work. Really make an effort! Sometimes the ideas will be great, sometimes they will be poor, sometimes new ideas will be non-existent. But go into the studio, go to your computer, to your piano, to your easel,  and do your job. When the economy was collapsing and bankers stopped going to work, I remember hearing world-renowned painter, Chuck Close, comment on NPR, that artists go into the studio no matter what's going on in the economy. Artist's make art because what they do, whether or not anyone buys it. 
Ideas inspire work and work inspires more ideas, so work, and think, and search for answers. And when they don't come right away, don't freak out, just let the questions marinate while you work on another project. Solutions aren't always immediate.

PLAY HARD 

For the luckiest among us, the line between work and play is very blurry. Actors get to spend their days pretending, artist's get to try new materials and marks. Writers wonder "what will happen if...." This is the exploration of childhood. Piaget called children little scientists because they're trying things out to see what will happen, and Picasso famously said, "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist when one grows up." 

The idea that work is not work unless it is odious, doesn't make sense to me. I think for the most part, would should be something that you should enjoy. I love the art of Robert Rauschenberg for it's fresh, whimsy and grown up humor. It's no wonder he offers this advise: "Have fun, if not you'll bore us." We don't want to look at or listen to or read anything that the artist, musician or writer found no joy in creating. 
Creativity requires a bit of fun, in fact Einstein defines creativity as "intelligence having fun." Fooling around is not a waste of time if it gets you seeing things in a different way and bares fruit from time to time.

Take Breaks

Catching ideas can be like catching fish, you have to sit still and relax before they come to you.  Often great ideas come in the shower, because, according to Leo Widrich, that's when our minds are relaxed and distracted with a, well, somewhat mindless activity. It's also a time dopamine is released. Many artists keep a pen and notepad on the nightstand since it is just before, during, or just after sleep that they are able to finally let go of the control enough for ideas to come together.
Albert Einstein put it so perfectly when he explained it this way: "As one grows older, one sees the impossibility of imposing your will on the chaos with brute force. But if you are patient, there may come that moment when, while eating an apple, the solution presents itself politely and says, "Here I am!"

 When I need to give a big presentation, I start with the work, researching, jotting down pertinent ideas. They I let all the ideas simmer, blend, clarify, and organize themselves over the course of weeks, as I drive to work or rest in the hammock. By the the time comes for me to get it down on paper, I already have all the components ready to go and it's just a matter of fine tuning. The fine tuning takes me back to the work mode, and the cycle starts over.

Mind Mapping a Vision for a New Year

In Jr. High I learned how to outline a paper using Roman numerals as main ideas, and capital letters as supporting details. The problem with this is that, it is too linear to make connections between ideas, big and small, and requires one to prematurely commit to an order. In his book, How to Think Like Leonardo DaVinci,  Michael J. Gelb, explains that mind mapping can help you explore ideas for a paper or project in a way that is more brain balanced.

You start by drawing a picture and a word or two in the center of a piece of paper that represents your subject. It may be body systems for a science project, a character for a novel you are writing, or an upcoming family reunion that you want to plan. From there you draw different colored arrows out from the center, for each main topic; so for the body systems, you'd have an arrow for the digestive system, another for the circulatory system, etc. You may have arrows branching to body parts with in each system. You can draw arrows between topics, for example, the oxygen from the respiratory will mix with the blood in the circulatory system, so add a word or picture and some arrows to show the connection.

I make a mind map each year (my new year starts in the fall with school), to chart my goals and vision for the upcoming academic calendar. I always place a balanced, happy life in the center, which often includes a picture of my home, because home is where my heart is. But the parts that I make goals for include work and finance. Health goals split into physical and spiritual hopes. Family is split into each child and the goals and things that I can help them achieve. I have a fun section that usually includes small, medium, and large trips I want to take. Going to Peru and Italy are long term goals that may not happen this year, but I want to keep them on my radar. Travel is with family and requires financial planning so it makes sense to place travel between the two. Other goals float between sections such as date nights with my husband, which pertains both to my "fun" and "family" topics; reading the New Testament this year is both a family goal and spiritual goal.

I keep my "vision board" mind map in the front of a new sketchbook every year and look at it often. It's not set in cement, but is always open for more scribbles. I check completed goals off with the dates, and sometimes write more detailed plans in the margins, like this last year as I approached the goal to pay off the mortgage and started charting out month by month how much to pay. I finished that goal early thanks to the reminder my mind map gave me.


While I use mind mapping to outline the goals I have for the future. I use other visual ways of remember events from the past. Several recent sketchbook pages have allowed me to look back with more gratitude for the gifts life has given me, such as adventures of scuba and sky diving, snow and water skiing. Rather than just listing out all of the fun things I've gotten to do, I made very simple illustrations to help me remember at a glance.

I may not remember every museum I've been to and its name, but I remember the location of many of them, and tried to document them. I've done similar pages for memorable meals and foods I've eaten, live theater performances, historical sites. I will probably do a page for National Parks and another for zoos, aquariums, and gardens.  Remembering all the little events that make up my life makes me feel rich and happy amid the daily mess of dishes and carpool. It's been fun to give myself these quick exercise in organizing the past and the future in a meaningful way.

New Illustrations

I was recently commissioned to a create a series of illustrations for a set of stories about two friends, a turtle (Heavy) and rabbit (Thump). Here are some ink and gouache images of the adventures of Thump and Heavy.  

Mosaics

Mosaics are pictures made from tiny tiles. Usually these are ceramic or glass squares. For my students, I cut up colored foam for an inexpensive alternative. Each student spray painted a piece of cardboard as a backing and used Elmer's glue to adhere the tiles.

This is a great project for children to gain fine motor skills and learn that many small things add up to make a big difference. There were some students who cut the foam in different sizes and shapes if they felt their image required it. And for students, who are blind, we left large spaces without tile, so that they would be able to feel the shape of the image without the confusion of having the background and foreground filled with texture. Maybe we'll try using ceramic tiles and grout in the future, but I found that this was a great way to introduce mosaics to children.

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!