Throughout the winter of 2008 and early in 2009, all classes worked on larger scale paintings.
(Middle School Art)
The two classes of middle school students worked on individual "tiles" or sections of two rather unique murals. One mural featured Mussorgsky's "Pictures in an Exhibition" and the other was based upon the famous childrens symphony "Peter and the Wolf" by Sergei Prokofiev.
Students first listened to the music and sketched ideas for the characters and the instruments. Then after scanning all of the individual drawings into “jpgs”, I spent several days
designing the large murals using the students drawings combined with copyright-free photos from the web. Using Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the photos to hi-key contrast and to posterize them, I then layered the work and designed the layouts in a very large Photoshop file.
Once the composition was finished, it was output to Illustrator, then as “.eps” to “.pdf” and then each of the 24 “tiles” was printed in full tone grayscale on letterhead sized paper.
The first job was to get some color. The idea was that we would paint with bright rainbow color, a field to cover each of the smaller canvases. So each student was given a 70 x 50 cm (28 x 20”) canvas, and proceeded to paint whatever they wished to create a large color field. We used only the primary colors: magenta, cyan and yellow acrylic, and the students mixed their own color variations for oranges, greens, violets and other colors.
Once these were completed, the color tubes were put away and only black and white tubes were made available. Students first were instructed to paint the white highlight areas first and then the grey value tones and then the blacks.
Each student used a scale-up technique that we had used on a prior assignment and then they mixed values on little plastic plates, used as palettes.
Each student was required to use a rather large 12 mm wide (½” wide) boar’s bristle brush. Each student was also required to bring their own brush and care for it and clean it and their work areas. (This point was a small nightmare for the teacher but we will leave that to your imagination.)
Each student worked in our “atelier” at their own easel.
A quick note here about the easels:
We needed 40 easels for the new art department at the beginning of the year. Fortunately, one of the directors had given me an unused mini easel (about 20” tall), which I originally nearly declined as it was so small. But later, I was able to use this as the model for the local carpenter, who used it to make our first six foot tall prototype and in turn, forty more for about a quarter of the cost of an imported art easel. We are using these easels now in every class and they are really wonderful.
The “atelier” is the special name for the class which I was after much negotiation, able to acquire. It is a double sized classroom upstairs in the unfinished portion of the school. With help from visiting art teachers, we measured off the classroom walls with blue masking tape to separate the “artists” by about one and a half meters each. Each student had his/her own workspace and this reduced the shenanigans by some percentage. I still found many delightful and unexpected surprises. For example to turn around to see one young man trying to pants his neighbor, or another running after another student with a loaded paint brush hollering “I’m gonna get you..back”!
There were several serious talks at the top of my lungs and several much delayed detentions given. But all in all when you look at the result, it is a really big work and the many latitudes (and errors) made by the students come finally together in a very sweet semi-abstracted work.
These two large murals will hang in the music room, and not only provide color and interest but will act as an acoustic dampener for a very acoustically bright room. I only wish the artworks would have helped dampen some of the extra acoustic chatter during the painting of the murals!
accomplished photographer as she. She is a Swedish born artist with 20 years in this country. Also she is the in-country photo correspondent for New York Times.
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