The Arts in Early Childhood and Upper School-September

Abintra is off to an exciting start in the Arts!

Early Childhood artists worked with the new EC art guide, Sarah, and some UE students on a collaboration piece for the Wine & Cheese Social.  Each child in ECA and ECB painted a large canvas that was cut into strips to hang origami books that the Upper School students made.  Sarah will be teaching art every Thursday with EC children starting in October. 

Upper School artists created over 100 origami books.  The books and canvas used were all recycled pieces. This beautiful installation cost only $8!

One of our goals in art for Early Childhood is to introduce the elements of design: color, line, shape, pattern, space, texture, and form.  This month the students are focusing on color.  They learn what the primary colors are and how to mix them to create the secondary colors. While exploring the mixing of colors, students learned about the American painter, Jackson Pollock.  He was known for his unique technique of drip painting.  This is an abstract form of painting in which paint is dripped or poured on the canvas.  Children learned what abstract art is and how it is more about what the artist thinks and feels.  They really enjoyed this lesson!

In Lower Elementary, the students begin to experiment with the elements of design.  They too started the year off with color.  They cut out primary and secondary colors mixed with the intermediate colors out of magazines to create these color wheels. 

Color Wheel by Oleja

Lower Elementary artists also explored the elements: line and shape.   After studying the work of American modern artist, ReggieLaurent, they created their own “shapely abstractions”.

Shapes & Lines by Sophia

Lower Elementary artists discussed how they can express feelings through color and line.  They explored these feelings with this fun exercise of creating colorful lines coming out of their mouth.

In Middle Elementary, students begin a more in-depth study of the elements of design.  The created these colorful drawings focusing on all the elements.

Elements of Design by Arthur

Middle Elementary artists are also practicing focused drawing of still-life compositions. An important part of the creative process in visual arts is training the artist to see the entire composition, notice details, and record what they have seen.  The still-life compositions were arrangements of white objects of varying shapes, sizes, and details. The students spent a minute just looking at the still-life, noting relationships between elements, light and dark, shapes, and how lighting affects shapes. They were given fifteen minutes to record what they saw without erasing. The view was rotated, and they followed the same procedure. The students also learned some techniques for loosening their pencil grip and incorporating mistakes into their drawings. Some of their comments:  "I like doing this because I could see more things."  "This was a lot of fun.  I like the way the objects looked like a building."  "It was really interesting to watch the light change."

Upper Elementary artists had the privilege to start their year in art off with their classroom guide, Maria. Maria attended the Tennessee Arts Academy this summer where she chose to focus on visual art. Among many wonderful art experiences, she enjoyed a clay project she did creating a tiki. The first great lesson in Upper Elementary is the Timeline of Civilization, and this year, the focus of the students' first research project focused on Polynesian culture. Maria wanted to do this project with her class, which integrated art with their current curriculum. I would say the project was a success to say the least! I’m not sure who had more fun, the students or Maria!

Middle School artists are currently exploring the fundamentals of drawing. They have been introduced to a variety of techniques, including how to draw 3-D shapes, show perspective, and the use of shading. By making “Zentangle” inspired drawings, they focused their attention upon line quality, pattern, texture, value, and shading. (A Zentangle is an abstract drawing created using repetitive patterns)  They are also practicing the use of 1 and 2-point perspective to create the illusion of three dimensional space, transforming basic shapes such as cubes and prisms into buildings of various shapes and sizes.

After Care artists created fall trees using tape to shape the trees and then painted the background using colors of fall leaves.

Fall Trees by Lily & Carter

After Care artists explore positive and negative space by creating these Notans: Japanese Principle of Dark and Light.

Japanese Notan by Ben

ME, UE, and MS have a year full of field trips in the Arts.  So far this year they have all visited the Frist to see the exhibition Real/Surreal:  Selections from the Whitney Museum of American Art.  A survey of works from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s that examines American artists' representations of reality as a subjective and malleable state of mind rather than a fixed truth. Influenced by European Surrealists of the 1920s like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, some American artists used the tools of illusionistic representation to subvert reality entirely, while others subtly tweaked the conventions of realism to turn the familiar into something unsettling and uncanny. The exhibition includes works by Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Man Ray and Thomas Hart Benton, among others. 

UE & MS also visited Cheekwood to see the exhibition of Andy Warhol’s Flowers.  This exhibition featured nearly a dozen screen prints from Warhol’s original “Flowers” series as well as paintings, studio photographs, and his audacious floral proposal for the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, Washington.   

UE visited the Symphony to see the performance of “Sunlight and Storms:  The Climate of Music”.  The performance was a musical journey through Earth’s atmosphere. Tying in science, it explored the ways in which composers such as Beethoven, Debussy and Prokofiev have been using the weather as inspiration for centuries. 

Upper Elementary had their first visit to the Nashville Children’s Theater to see the show, The Outsiders.   In this intense coming-of-age story set in 1965 Tulsa, Oklahoma, you're either a Greaser or a Soc. When these two gangs from opposite sides of the track clash, young Ponyboy will have to depend on his brothers and friends to survive.  Written by a teenager, about teenagers and for teenagers, S.E Hinton's first novel has captured generations of adolescent readers and is just as relevant today as it was when it first burst on the scene almost 50 years ago.

Middle School is reading the 2005 republication of the authoritative American English writing style guide, The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. This book was illustrated by Maira Kalman, who recently had a show at the Frist Center.  Middle School had the wonderful opportunity to see the show.  Kalman’s illustrations whimsically embody the didactic examples of grammar rules and their breakage provided by this essential text for writers. Phrases like “But animals do not comprise (‘embrace’) a zoo—they constitute a zoo” and “None of us is perfect” inspired Kalman’s visual witticisms. Her use of flattened space, strong colors and childlike figures provide an enjoyable lesson in both literary and visual literacy.