Portrait Backgrounds 2013

This year ZIPPED past. These paintings, a combination of watercolor and regular-any-old-day tempera (in gray, white, and black) are accented with GOLD tempera. This class places high value -- even glitter-level value -- on gold tempera. The children of Tracks class 2013 are very much about destination, so it made sense to create grand cities with sparkling night skies, shimmering with every color of light, as the backgrounds for their portraits. Paul Klee's work was key.

The work on these backgrounds began weeks and weeks ago. They are so large, that only a handful could be worked on at one time. The paintings had to be moved and stored, and occasionally sorted, re-sorted, but I did not see all of them together until I took the photographs of them today. One word...STUNNING. The children's portraits will be layered on top of these over the next few days. Really looking forward to seeing that last step!

Wooden Blocks

Last year the children painted wooden blocks referencing Hundertwasser. Those blocks had windows and doors.

This year, they painted blocks inspired by Kokeshi dolls -- not in terms of shape, but in terms of message. This doll holds a message or a story. The main reason for this is because I only had rectangular blocks available and Kokeshi dolls are made on a wood lathe (all curves). So to get to the story part, we hid the doll layer beneath shadow lines of black tempera. Now you can only see hints of the story the blocks held. This may not make sense, in fact, I thought the children would lose the original thread of the discussion, "This is a..." but many of them didn't.

They wanted the blue painters' tape placed just so in order to either hide or reveal key pieces of their blocks, a face here, or color blending there. Each block holds a story. The stories are recorded and the blocks will stay at school for future building projects. The "Kokeshi" block stories will have new chapters written each year.

Can They Really Do That?

The answer is, "yes" but I am not asking this question just about children's work and the many things they are capable of. I am talking about how adults can approach the presentation, or invitation, for painting.

I have been thinking about this year's class, their interests, and how they, as a group, approach painting, building, and most importantly, playing. This class has a great sense of place and when I think of them I think Destinations and how the children like to shape their play by setting up or defining place first and then exploring character and story line.

Paul Klee, Rhythmical
Image Credit: www.wikipaintings.org

Paul Klee, Burg und Sonne
Image Credit: www.xn--herrbscher-eeb.de

I think of Paul Klee when I think about this group's sensibilities. They had really embraced the fairytale city studies from a few weeks ago. So, today, I wanted them to begin to build their backgrounds using just black, gray, and white which would later be stained with watercolor or perhaps even ink, oh and gold, definitely gold!

That's all well and good, a good plan as plans go, but I was knocked down with pneumonia and needed to stay home on Monday and perhaps even longer. So after phone calls and messaging sessions back and forth with links and attachments with Andrea, the other teacher at our school, a plan was in put place to go ahead and FLY, or rather sketch, because that is what these paintings are, sketches.

So I learned something important today. When I was working on my teaching degree, we were instructed to craft lesson plans as if someone else would have to implement them, you know, in case you needed a sub. I don't miss school enough to have this tested and I actually never write lesson plans anyway. The work we undertake is a collaborative process of serendipity, happenstance, and humans. Children change each month, each year, and while we establish a thread over the course of the year, a new approach must be fashioned with each new group. So this method, phone calls, messaging, ended up being very, very effective. And this made me happy because it is hard for me to miss school and really hard to miss the joy of a new painting.

Andrea and I talked about which brushes to use, colors, about sky, how high the buildings would need to go. Note: these are the backgrounds for the self portraits so the bottom third will certainly be covered by the portraits and this is the first large scale painting project the children have undertaken. Their eyes and efforts needed to be trained up toward the top of the composition. All of these things we discussed, large and small and with a little bit of mind reading, Andrea tells me. And of course, Andrea is a most excellent teacher, so in the end, the children, of course, could and did do it and the adults' work wasn't too shabby either!