My Latest column for Westport Patch on the ArtSmart program I'm involved in at my kids' school. Exciting side note, my friend Tammy, whose project I mention here, just told me she got a part-time job teaching art because of this latest publicity. (I'm sure it had a little something to do with her talent, too.) Go Tammy!
"I've been an Art Smarts volunteer at my kids' school for a few years now, and I'd have to describe it as a learning experience — for me, not the kids. For those of you who aren't familiar, Art Smarts is a nationwide art enrichment program in which parents give a presentation on a famous artist and the students then create artwork in a similar style.
But of course they learn about artists such as Van Gogh, Calder and Matisse in their regular art class, too. Why they need a few untrained moms to come in and try to give a quick tutorial on, say, impressionism, is a bit of a mystery.
But no matter. Thanks to my artistic ineptitude, it's almost always good comedy. I've learned to let go of my expectations, because you just never know. In my son's third grade classroom, we recently did a felting craft tied to Matisse. We were sure it would be a disaster. Two of the three of us on the committee had no idea how to felt. We didn't have black wool (essential to Matisse's work), and it turned out it took 25 minutes of serious elbow grease to transform wool into felt. Regardless, the finished works were amazing and beautiful— far better than we ever could have imagined.
Then there have been projects that have gone horribly awry. For a second grade class, I organized a project based on Niki de St. Phalle, who built enormous, colorful sculptures out of papier-mâché. Her work was inherently child-like and was sure to appeal. And what kid doesn't like papier-mâché.? I gave each kid a rock and a coil of wire. The idea was to use the rock as a base, wrap the wire up and around it and form a shape that then would be papier-mâchéd. Except it turned out it was a lot harder than I expected to create a sturdy wire sculpture above a rock. Kids tried to make their creations about two feet tall, which promptly fell right over, bringing the gooey strips of newspaper and glue with them.
"I just don't know how to help them," their teacher fretted, dismayed over the project's difficulty, and probably the floury mixture that coated every table in the room. I went home frustrated that I'd put so much time into the project only to field complaints. Why bother? But she was right. I'd forgotten one cardinal rule: What's easy at home working one-on-one with my own child might be quite a bit more challenging when I've got a 20 kids diving into the project head first.
For every flop, there's the occasional breath-taking success. Last year, Saugatuck mom Tammy Winser spearheaded a much buzzed-about project in the vein of Vik Muniz, an abstract artist who uses food in his work. She asked her second graders to glue jelly beans onto small squares of clear acetate, following a pixilated color pattern she placed underneath. Individually, each child's sheet looked like, well, candy, not art. But then the children brought their squares together, lined them up in order and stepped back. After a second or two, they saw it: a 3-½-foot by 3-½-foot portrait of their teacher.
"The kids screamed, 'Oh my God, that is her!' when they got it," Winser said. "They just couldn't imagine how a sheet with jelly beans glued on was going to turn out to be a picture of anything."
I'd be willing to bet that was a lesson on pointillism and collaborative art the kids will remember for years.
And maybe we don't even recognize our successes. One project I led was based on Gaudi, the Spanish surrealistic architect who used mosaic in much of his work. The kids made clay lizards, painted them in bright colors and then attached tile and ceramic chips. As often happens, some of them really got it, some of them maybe didn't. The lizards were colorful and lovely, even if the kids couldn't have cared less about the presentation on the artist.
Then a week or two later, the mother of one of those students told me she was flipping through an old photo album of a trip to Barcelona when her son stopped her and pointed to a picture of the local architecture.
"Hey," he said, "that looks like Gaudi." And in fact it was.
