Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture and Cuisine at Art Institute of Chicago

Food and art enthusiasts should be excited for the exhibition that showcases food in American Painting that spans 1750-1965, which is on display until January 27th, 2014 in the Windy City. I wrote about food as the subject of painting for my grade 6 students not too long ago and created my own presentation here. Food is a great way to connect with students and drawing and painting food reinforces so many fundamental art skills I teach that include: how to draw volume, perspective, color theory and how to create an overall composition that has a focal point. Click here to see some of the final paintings my former grade 6 students created with tempera paint on canvas panels.

Lime and Coconut by Monica Hopenwasser

Sometimes when I feel like I am in an creative rut, I return to subjects I love (or hate, depending on my mood) to focus on my skills, rather than the concept or idea for the painting/drawing. I am a foodie and food is accessible, comforting and something I always go back to when I just need to draw and practice observation.

        

If you can't make it to Chicago, you can own the book that accompanies the exhibition, which I found at Barnes and Noble while holiday shopping and I was excited at the compilation of both well-known and some lesser known artists that I can share in my presentation when I teach this project. One criticism I have is that I wish the exhibition included more recent works and emerging talent from the past twenty years, instead of ending with the 1960s. With current trends of farm to table eating habits, banning of trans fats, and vegan and gluten free living, it would be interesting to see how artists today depict foods that reflect recent American culture, politics and economies and showcase more contemporary artists. 

 
Check out the links below to read reviews and learn more about the exhibition.
Art Institute of Chicago
Wall Street Journal Online
Chicago Reader
Chicagoist

ABC Local News Video

Mixed Media Collage Inspired by Music

Music is a powerful way to convey emotion, tell a story or create an imaginary world that transports us to another place. I love to integrate music into the art making process in variety of ways. Whether it serves as a backdrop to create a mood in the classroom or the song itself is used to inspire a painting or drawing; music touches us all and is a great way to connect with students of all ages. Music can reveal feelings and emotions that are sometimes difficult to put into words and capture poetic sentiments that paint a picture. Teens go through so many changes and face a lot of pressure socially, academically and sometimes struggle to find their identity or express who they are inside. This collage project is conceptual and personal and a great way to evoke personal expression. Students choose a song (it can be a poem or story too) that they want to depict in a 2-D collage that integrates text and image to create a final, unified artwork. This project is a great way to get to know your students on a more intimate level and can reveal much about what is going on inside that student. This project is challenging because not only do they have to integrate text into their composition they have to choose materials wisely and use the elements of art to make connections between their components.  

The basic steps for this project are:

• Students pick a song (it can be a poem or story too) that they are connected to in some way. The song should not be offensive or contain explicit lyrics. Use your discretion as a teacher for what is appropriate depending on your setting. 
• Next, have students print out and write about the lyrics they choose in their sketchbook. Some thought provoking/brainstorming questions to get the creative juices flowing include:
• Who or what is the song about?
• What do you associate with this genre of music?
• What images come to mind when you read the words to this song?
• What images come to mind when you hear the music/melody to this song?
• What is the artist/song trying to convey?
• What mood is created by this song/music?
• What colors come to mind when you hear this song?
• What kind of marks/lines/shapes do you associate when you hear this song?
• Why do you like this song?
• How can you use color to capture the emotion in the song?
• What story does this song tell? 

Now, students can begin to storyboard, draw pictures, and collect images to start the project. Here is a must have for starting the project–Students must create an original substrate or background to jump start their collage. This means they create a background that has color(s), texture(s), and/or shapes instead of just starting with a white piece of paper for the background. This is a whole little mini project in itself and forces students to create something that relates to the song but is abstract or more of a design that they will build on for their collage. 

I like to work along side students to demonstrate the steps and process and emphasize how to integrate the elements, blur edges and layer the images and text. The computer can be a great way to print text and create unique images using image editing software. Below are some examples of high school Studio Art 1 students who completed the project. 

"Mad as Rabbits” song by Panic! at the Disco

“Your Time Has Come” song by Audioslave

"Pocketful Of Sunshine" song by Natasha Bedingfield

“Marvelous Things” song by Eisley

 

 

 

Professional Development at Museum of Arts and Design, Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital

I attended an amazing professional development for educators that celebrated the new exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) titled Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital. It was a day packed with a lot of activity with an artist talk and tour and two fun and informative workshops that related to the exhibition. I would love to take some students on a tour via ArtEsteem, so please contact me if you want to arrange a group visit. The expansive exhibition covers three floors and showcases a variety of 21st-century artist creations that utilize advanced methods of computer-assisted production known as digital fabrication in their artwork. Think 3-D printing, laser cutting, and digital knitting.

Artist Talk

Alissia Melka-Teichroew started the morning with an inspiring artist talk and presented her story and artwork. She is a New York-based industrial designer who is featured in Out of Hand that exhibits her jointed jewels that use 3-D printing. She grew up in the Netherlands and talked about how her culture and environment had a huge impact on how she thinks about design. She described the Netherlands as being very efficient in design and how they plan everything from how they design and organize their tax forms and money to architecture and bikes ... she emphasized how the Dutch really plan everything to maximize use and aesthetic with funny quips and photos that accompanied her presentation. I really liked her approach to her design process where she stated that she "thinks from a story, not a material." The story is what drives her creations and the making and fabricating comes after ... "So the material needs to enhance, strengthen the story I am trying to tell through design."

Alissia Melka-Teichroew, New York based Industrial Designer

Alissia shared some of her projects and I especially liked her clever and playful Tiffany inspired Diamond Sterling Silver Ring, which is emblematic of love and marriage. She takes the classic style and silhouette and puts her spin on it by slicing it (with no real diamond) and making it out of an unconventional material like acrylic or sterling silver thus making it modern and edgy. It tells a story about our obsession with jewelery and status and the idea is that you can buy as many as you want because her rings are inexpensive.

She also created collections of Jointed Jewels that combine the old with the new that conjures up images of the plastic Pop-It Beads from the 1950s. Alissia puts a modern twist on this idea and utilizes 3-D printing to manufacture the pieces. Although they are jointed like ball joints, the jewelry is actually made in one-piece and not assembled. Another design challenge she presented to herself using digital fabrication was how small can you make something wearable without breaking it utilizing the 3-D printing process.


Exhibition
The exhibition Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital has something for everyone and does a beautiful job showcasing the work and describing the processes the artists used to generate their creations. We toured the exhibition and collected raw data about the work by choosing a theme and writing down our observations in regards to the theme we choose. Observing the art and collecting information in regards to comparative themes is a great activity for adults and students and something I will definitely incorporate into future lessons. It allows you to analyze the work and form important questions about what you are looking at and how it can be used or viewed. Some theme examples included: Figurative vs Non-Figurative, Art vs Design, Synthetic vs Natural, Functional vs Non-functional, and Digital vs Non-digital

 Below are are a few highlights from the show.

Nervous System, Hyphae Pendant Lamps, 2013, Nylon, LED lights

I love these modern, organic lights that blur the lines between art and design, as well as synthetic vs natural from the duo known as Nervous System. The patterns they project on the wall are almost as powerful as the fabrication of the lights themselves. Science meets art meets nature meets technology in these digitally fabricated works. Nervous System also makes affordable cool jewelry and art objects inspired by science and nature that are generated by technology. Check out their website here and learn more about them.

Clone Chair, Julian Mayor

Original Queen Anne side chair

Juilan Mayor is a designer based in East London who created a replica of the Queen Anne side chair and used the original chairs "DNA" to create a laser cut plywood chair made of vertical pieces of wood. I like idea of replicating an object and putting a modern twist on it and creating something new from the old by transforming the process and/or materials.

Untitled, 2008, Concrete, pigment, Anish Kapoor

When I first saw these works I thought they were handmade out of clay ... but this is a digital fabrication show, and to learn about how they were made and the concept behind the work was an aha moment. I was amazed how the fabrication process mimics nature and it is almost impossible to tell the difference between handmade and made by machine.

Untitled, 2008, Concrete, pigment, Anish Kapoor (wall piece)

“The hand of the artist is much estimated as the means by which the expression of art finds a voice. To make art without a hand is a goal that sets art beyond expression. Artists have found ways to subvert the means of production. Some three years ago, Adam Lowe and I wondered if it were possible to make a machine that could generate form. The printing machine formed a model for the basis of our thinking. After much trial and error, we found a surprisingly simple way of making a workable engine. Once we started making objects, a new reality began to emerge. These objects were like no others; they seemed to obscure the border between artifice and event. These are objects more akin to natural things than those made by design."

           – Anish Kapoor

Hands-on Workshops

Finally, we educators had the opportunity to make our own objects and learn more about 3-D printing. The company Solidoodle has partnered with MAD during this exhibition and demonstrated the 3-D printing process and software needed to produce small objects that range in the 6 x 6 inch range. They are based in Brooklyn and you can learn more about them here. We learned about creating an original model or finding one online, how to convert the model into something (code!) that the printer can understand and then how the printer melts and uses a filament to produce a plastic model. Another cool resource to learn more about models and 3-D printing is at the website Thingiverse that features model collections that allow you to explore and create your won 3-D objects. The printers we used in the workshop run about $600.00 (not bad!).

 

 

 The second workshop was hands-on and used craft materials like straws, cardboard, colored wire, scissors and tape to make sculptures that reflected strange statistics (like you blink over 10,000,000 times a year or a dragonfly’s first six months of life are spent underwater.) that may or may not be true. This is a great activity to do with students that could generate a worthy discussion about fact finding and what makes a reliable resource on the Internet.  This workshop correlated to the artist talk early in the day, where we had to tell a story about the statistic, then incorporate the materials we had on hand. It forced us to tell a story and the materials were secondary in the process.

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A New Creative Challenge from Scholastic: The Gedenk Award for Tolerance

The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards is a great way for students to put their work out in the public sphere and earn recognition for their talents. I have had many students receive honors from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards over the years and I am impressed with their commitment to The Arts. This year scholastic announced announced a new creative challenge around an issue that is close to my heart, Genocide and The Holocaust. 

From Scholastic:
The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers has partnered with the Gedenk Movement to present a special creative challenge for the 2014 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. The Gedenk Award for Tolerance asks students to create original works of art or writing that demonstrate their role in cultivating tolerance.

Five top works will receive National Medals and academic awards of $1,000 each for work addressing the Gedenk Movement's important message and mission.

Submissions should reflect upon lessons learned from the Holocaust and other genocides, and attempt to raise awareness of the importance of increasing tolerance to safeguard a peaceful society.

Work may be submitted within any of the Awards' categories of art or writing, via the Awards' online registration system. For more information about this special award, visit www.artandwriting.org/gedenk, and check out our partners at the Gedenk Movement at www.gedenkmovement.org. 

Inquiry and Critical Thinking in Art

There are some great writings and research about how inquiry-based instruction can deepen critical thinking and cognitive abilities and Nancy Lampert, an Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, recently published her findings in The Journal of the National Art Education Association. I really like the Identity Project she implemented in her study called the Inside/Outside Identity Box. This activity can really give one insight into a child’s perceptions about themselves and how they think the world perceives them. The outside of the box represents how the world sees them and the inside of the box describes how the children see themselves.

 Before creating the box, students complete a worksheet where they write down words to describe how they think others see them and how they see themselves. Next, the critical thinking and problem solving begins. How do students translate these characteristics and traits they wrote down into a visual language using color, shapes, and symbols? For example, how would a child visually represent the idea of being perceived as outgoing and loud? What colors, shapes and symbols can they construct to convey this idea? Here lies a big challenge. There is not one way to illustrate these ideas and I think it is important to teach students about the possibilities and the idea of trial and error. 

There is a wonderful psychological component to this project too that students can reflect on when complete. How does the inside and outside of the box differ? How are they connected? Finally, this project reinforces that we are all unique individuals and no two-identity boxes are alike. According to Lampert, through critical analysis and discussion students were able to make connections between the artwork they made and what it represented, although it was difficult at times to make out what the artist was trying to communicate. I think this project can be very therapeutic and serve as an assessment tool and identify students who may struggle with their identity and self-esteem.

Another good read about inquiry based education is The Art of the Powerful Question, which addresses how to construct and engage with provocative thoughtful questions, rather than focusing on a right answer.

Inquiry based learning is a hot topic and here are some points to keep in mind when
designing a lesson.

• Ask open-ended questions in regards to the theme of your project
• Brainstorm on ideas and information
• Promote discussion around the subject/theme and encourage different points of view
• Encourage students to question and reflect on their own questions
• Make connections with the project/theme to other relevant disciplines
• Foster creativity and imagination
• Emphasize experimentation

 

ArtEsteem: Private Art Lessons and Mentoring in New York City for Ages 7 and Up

 

Check out my new company and website at
www.ArtEsteem.com
 
Spark your childs creative potential and confidence through the creative process. ArtEsteem offers private art lessons in the privacy and comfort of your home and teach the fundamentals through advanced techniques in drawing, painting and collage, as well as digital tools and techniques.

Whether it be an introduction to the fundamentals of drawing perspective or an in depth exploration into Impressionism or landscape painting, your child’s art experience is tailored to meet their curiosity or pique a new interest through exposure to The Arts. Making the transition to middle school and navigating these developmental years can be a stressful adjustment for your child and through the art making process your child will learn self-management, organizational skills, discipline, critical thinking and analytical skills and build character and confidence as they develop and hone their fine art talents. 

Please contact me if you are interested in private art lessons  and schedule a free consultation at monica@ArtEsteem.com.

 

Grade 7 Perspective Paintings in Progress

Students are working toward completion of their Perspective Project, which utilized One-Point and Two-Point Perspective drawing techniques. For the majority of Grade 7 students this was the first time learning this technique, which further developed their skills in creating the illusion of a 3-D space on a 2-D surface. Students had a choice of materials and some students used watercolors, while others opted for tempera paints.
Check out the the photos of students at work.

Impressionism, Monet and Sunsets

Before students start their unique, final landscape paintings, they worked with the tempera paints and brushes to master their brush strokes. In a structured mini-lesson, students experimented with techniques used by the French Impressionists, which I demonstrated in class and they recreated a "Monet Sunset". This mini-lesson let students focus on technique, rather than the subject, which built up their confidence and reinforced the techniques demonstrated in class. We spent about 2-3 classes @ 45 minutes to complete this exercise. Students also learned about Pointillism and the dots used to create an image that is blended together by the viewers eye. 

Below are pictures of Grade 6 students at work and enjoying the process. Many students had never painted in this style before nor really had a full understanding of Impressionism and how to create depth in an artwork and go about their painting. Many lessons have been learned!

Linear Perpsective and American Painters

Grade 7 students studied Linear Perspective drawing techniques to further their knowledge and understanding on how to create depth in their artwork, especially with geometric forms found in a cityscape. We examined the artworks of American painters Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam and Georgia O'Keeffe (yes, she did paint some cityscapes) and compared and contrasted their different styles and themes in their paintings. Additionally, we studied important terms and concepts that are essential to drawing perspective.

Important Terms and Concepts

– Picture Plane

– Viewfinder

– Linear Perspective
  One, Two and Three-Point Perspective

– Depth

– Horizon Line

– Vanishing Point

– Construction Lines (aka Orthogonal Lines)