The Art Room: March 2011

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Cat in the Hat cross-hatching

First and Second grade artists learned about Dr. Seuss. His middle name was Seuss and he was both a talented author and illustrator. We discussed how he created visual texture using a drawing pen and an art technique called cross-hatching to create texture in his art. These cross-hatch lines also create the illusion of being 3-D.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Digital Art show!

Thank you to everyone who attended the celebration of Youth Art Month at our District 97 Art show!!! We had a awesome turn out. Thank you for your support! Mr. Leban (art teacher at Brooks) and myself photographed the art show and made it available online. You can view the whole show in a cool video slide-show or click on each individual school to see the artwork they had in the show. Check it out!! District 97 Art show

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Mondrian's chair

2nd and 3rd graders had the opportunity to paint this Mondrian-inspired chair during lunch art. We learned that Mondrian's artwork uses bold black outlines, squares and rectangles and the three primary colors. We modeled our chair after his artwork. Ms. Lacey will be using the chair to raise money for Haiti.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Rain Barrel!

Here's the Romero Britto inspired Rain Barrel 3A artists made for the PTO Auction. Britto's work has has bold black outlines, bright colors, and fun patterns. We tried to pattern our work after his as we painted the four seasons on the barrel. This was a blast and has received tons of compliments.

Art Shows and Youth Art Month

Happy March Art Parents!
March is nationally recognized as Youth Art Month. In celebration, O.W. Holmes is involved in two art shows. The larger of the two shows is a District wide art show featuring artwork from every school in D97, including the middle schools, at Oak Park River Forest High School. Every classroom at Holmes is represented and has a few pieces of artwork in the show. If your student has work in the show, you will be informed via a letter in the mail very soon. The opening reception is Wednesday March 9th from 6 pm-7:30 pm at OPRF. OPRF art students will be giving tours of the high school art department as well. The artwork will be on display there until 3/23. Please stop by and see the great things that are happening this year in art rooms across the district. The official invitation is printed on the back of this sheet.
The second art show is happening now at the Oak Park public library from until 3/31. This show features the artwork of Holmes students only. Ms. Bernstein’s, Ms. Anderson’s and Ms. Peterson’s and Ms. Rehfield’s entire classes have art work on display there. There are also about 20 students from various classes that have work in the show as well.
Please come check out our hard work!

10 things learned in Art

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.

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