Painting What You Can Dream Up

Oh, the days before the winter break, oh my. ...And still there is wonderful art to be made with ART YARD BKLYN!

Middle school students from South Ozone Park's MS 226 worked with Teaching Artist Glendalys Medina to SHARPEN their color identification skills - by naming the colors found on a number 2 pencil. It might seem like they're just yellow with a pink tip - but these observant 6th graders found way more colors.

Glendalys demonstrated how to draw curved and circular pencils as well as using the pencil image to create text.

Adding just the colors found on a pencil (yellows, pinks, silvers, browns - and several varieties of each of those) to their pencil drawings of objects drawn with pencils (yes - with pencils but also with pencils drawn into the details), students created abstract works of bananas, faces, dragons, water bottles and lots of other stuff found around a classroom.

During critique, willing participants enjoyed identifying comparisons and contrasts while compliments were humble and heartfelt. A well-attended round of critique is never POINTLESS - everyone benefits!

Vocabulary words for this session: circular, definition, hue, variation

Meanwhile in the ART YARD Gallery at MS 226...

Liaison Assistant Principal Michele Cohen had us all on task, on time and held accountable for doing the best possible job we can.

Liaison: n.

the contact or connection maintained by communications between units the organization in order to ensure concerted action, cooperation, etc.

Working with Teaching Artist Claudia Alvarez students rose to the challenge to TRANSFORM their ink drawings completed last week with watercolor.

Claudia asked us to ponder the possibility of what we can envision in our wildest dream. Quoting Flight of Fancy: Magritte’s Clairvoyance from It’s Not Just About Art website: “In painting titled, clairvoyance, the bird could simply be helping Magritte think of as metaphor for breaking from historical tradition of painting what you can see, to painting what you can dream up”.

Students worked to great results in watercolor on top of ink on Bristol paper.

Claudia and I were quite pleased by the serious focus from our participating artists. In fact, our critiques were a testament to the level participants are now holding themselves accountable! -- Insightful, thoughtful, erudite and kind.

I hope that you all have a wonderful winter break -- filled with artmaking, deep meditative thought and profound inspiration!

We shall see you all in 2019!

PS Please join me for the opening of my solo exhibition A Portrait of my Mother at Kentler International Drawing Space, 353 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY on Friday January 4th from 6-9pm.