Our Message, Our Dreams
Updated: May 22, 2021
This week at ART YARD Art Matters at PS282 Teaching Artist Claude Viaud Peralta guided us into to world of our dreams. We looked at work by Salvatore Dali, Remedios Varo, Wassily Kandinsky, and Edvard Munch as well as Claude’s own drawings. We agreed that dreams are a fascinating world unto their own, where the strange can seem real, and magical occurrences are not in the least out of the ordinary.
The dreams of sleep -- fantastical, wonderful, weird and at times frightening were the main focus of our work today. But we were also free to explore daydreams and imagination. Claude explained he felt that the world of dreams would be rich fodder for artmaking. He said he thinks about his dreams a lot and finds it an inspiring exercise to get stuck in his imagination. The excellent artwork created by the students proves that he’s not the only on to feel that way!
Sakura depicted a candy land dream. Saying that she had so much fun, as always.
Jack enjoyed using different colors and using his imagination to conceive and depict his dream.
John had a very in depth description to share with the class! He drew “one space rocket with a lemming chasing another space rocket with grizzly through stars and asteroids” inspired by his favorite cartoon show.
In her dream, Lucy was searching for bugs and birds while watching the sunset. She’s holding a camera and magnifying glass. Lucy’s mother Sophie adds that Lucy was excited to tell her mom that she was using mixed media (markers and gel sticks)!
Speaking of materials, Lorenzo is back at his sumi-e painting.
Logan, who has been practicing her watercolor skills between classes, made a beautiful painting about her dream which took place at a cabin in the mountains.
August painted a nightmare of people stealing from a bank using an exaggerated perspective to make the bank appear to loom over the street.
Rhys also drew a scary dream. He tells us: “it’s a monster under the water and its horn is sticking out but it’s disguised so it looks like a pyramid. You can only see its arms and legs and horns. There are reflectors coming out of the house reflecting the suns light and making it seem darker. There’s a camera on a kite taking a picture of the monster. This is the picture (points at black spider-like thing under the camera) and there’s an antique truck.”
Lola illustrated her dream of a doll house complete with quite a cast of characters.
Coco wearing a beautiful rainbow stripped dress, dreams of a magical rainbow staircase.
Emma projected an enigmatic space of emptiness. She shared a profound description of solitude during critique and explained that she chose to use polka dots are to make the space feel empty. Our budding philosopher suggests that if we feel empty inside, then we can simply chose to inhabit that feeling and call it home.
As Lewis Carrol penned in Through The Looking Glass: “In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die: Ever drifting down the stream- Lingering in the golden gleam- Life, what is it but a dream?”
As usual, Vera has done a great job on the video recap! Take a look.
ART YARD Advanced Studio were treated to a wonderful session called Our Signs Our Message with Vera Tineo! Vera combined several core ideas of interest to all of us, in particular getting our message out into the world.
Vera, who is currently in the Dominican Republic visiting with her extended family, prepared an excellent PowerPoint presentation which included work by Alicia Henry, Adrian Piper, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, her own prints and even a really funny TicToc project. Vera suggested to us that the topic of our piece could be deeply personal, light-hearted, serious, political, funny, inspiring – in short we had free reign for content. However, we were challenged to find a way to bring our work into the public realm.
Reflecting upon the session, Vera writes: “This Monday I was able to share my love of posters and striking imagery. We explored the power of images with an Alicia Henry piece representing the normality of Black Death and words with Adrian Piper - words that negate identity of race and gender. I chose to share artists whose work would inspire our community members to share a message with their community. Like something culturally important or funny on a poster that only people from our community, our family, could understand and relate to.”
Maraya, who created a very personal piece about her brother, Marilyn speaking out about litter, and I with a message about wrongful incarceration, made copies of our work which we hung and placed in public. Update: Two of Marilyn’s posters are still hanging. Mine were gone the next day, but that could have been my subpar double stick tape.
