Summer Art Adventure

Being an art student, I have had opportunities to study in different environments and have new experiences to help inform my body of work. Last Summer I went to Paris for 4 weeks and studied the great Art Movements of France as well as visited museums daily and keep a sketchbook / journal of the daily events. Plus I kept you all apprised of my activities with the ever-playful “Picture a Day” posts (which I plan to continue this summer). It was a great honor and exciting adventure for me. This summer I will also be studying art in a faraway land. The exotic locale this year is Fresno.

Yes. Fresno.

It may not seem like much, this healthy sized city smack dab in the center of California, but it is home to the CSU Summer Arts program which offers intensive classes for CSU students and alumni to further their artistic studies. The program offers students one-on-one conversations with successful artists and critics about how to grow their work. There are seminars and studios for everyone to just buckle down and make art, whether that is studio art, music, theater, dance, etc. It is an opportunity to focus on your art form without the daily distractions. A rare luxury.

Fresno is beyond HOT in the summertime. Every correspondence spends at least a paragraph trying to prepare students for this heat. It is also not exactly known to be a hub of excitement, a far cry from my beloved Paris with its monuments, museums, and sidewalk cafés. But there is one thing about Fresno which makes it one of the most important and exciting places for artists.

Fresno State was the home of the Feminist Art Movement and the first Feminist Art studies program. Headed in 1970 by Judy Chicago and pushing the boundaries of the art world. It is an absolute honor to be on the same campus as those brave women who boldly created a new academic program and raised questions about equity in art. Fresno State fostered an environment for women to act creatively and create works that not only were artistically challenging, but socially challenging as well. The program eventually relocated to California Institute of the Arts in 1971 where it attracted national media coverage with their project, WOMANHOUSE. This particular piece stands out as one of the most important works of contemporary art. I am thankful for the groundbreaking work of these brave ladies from Fresno State (and CalArts). Without the work they did in the 1970s there may not have been as many opportunities for me as a female artist.

So upon first glance, my Summer Art Adventure doesn't seem like much… but knowing the history and how that connects to me as an artist has just made Fresno seem a lot more exciting.

xx

**keep an eye out for my picture-a-day posts from Fresno this summer!

Art Is So Much More

This past weekend I was asked to participate in a Chalk Festival being put on by the Simi Valley Public Library and a local Girl Scout troop. Hosting and running a community event would help the scouts earn their Bronze Award. I was proud to help them toward reaching that goal. I got down to Simi Valley around 7:45 a.m., packed in my street painting stuff and waited until just before 8:00 when the Troop Leader and other Chalk Artists arrived. It was a lovely day and I found a nice shady spot under a tree to set up my initial grid and sketch. As Mother’s Day was the following day, I decided to recreate a cropped version (for modesty’s sake) of Gustav Klimt’s Mother and Child, c. 1905.


What I did not know as I set up for the day was that this experience was going to change the way I look at street painting.

As usual, I sketched out the piece and went through the process of choosing which pastels were going to make up the flesh tones of this particular portrait. The earphones went on and I began to draw the mother’s face. A few hours into it, I was ready to do the last minute shading and highlights and move on to drawing the child. At this point a large number of girl scouts, troop leaders, and families were crowded around at my piece and trying to figure out my technique. I ended up turning of my trusty iPod and giving an impromptu lesson on shading and highlights. The children had lots of questions and I was happy to answer them. I am no art teacher, but as a mother and a person truly passionate about the arts, I very much enjoyed the interaction.

I spoke with a local public school teacher about how the schools have had to reduce their art programs. It’s becoming a widespread phenomenon as California searches for ways to reduce its budget. How heartbreaking it is that music and art is being cut from curriculum when there is so much interest in it. Not to mention the incredible benefits of an arts education. No one has summarized it more fully than education advocate, Eliott Eisner:

10 LESSONS THE ARTS TEACH

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. http://www.naea-reston.org/

I feel that all the artists who participated were actively advocating Arts education, and giving the community the opportunity to see art being created. All of the painters indulged the children (and some adults too!) about our process: creating grids, using proportions, discussing the history of the artworks, allowing them to experiment with some of our pastels, and allowing them to draw along side us.

President Barack Obama once stated, "The future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create." I hope that by making public art, I have been able to spark that kind of creativity in the minds and hearts of future leaders.