I did two children's art classes yesterday. This image is a drawing done by my son Jonathan (15 years old). Since my post of last week talking about teaching art to children, I have received many artists friends' comments and emails. Many of them provided me information of website links of art teaching projects. I want to thank all of you for supporting me and help me out. I have been googling and try to find appropriate projects that I can use to beef-up my curriculum. I am sorry to say I have rejected most of them from the Internet and ended up creating most of the projects by myself. Personally, I feel the current art education has over emphasized too much the importance of the Impressionism and the modern trend. So many projects online try to teach kids how Van Gogh and Warhol paints. I have not seen any project teaches how Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Bouguereau, and Sargent paints. For those artists, art education can only talk about them as a part of history lessons. I really believe this kind of representation art is teachable if the teacher arrange the projects properly. Those are the projects I would like to involve into my curriculum. I understood that most of children love to draw during their kindergarten, elementary, and part of the middle school. However most children conclude they can not draw when they are around 12 years or older. The reason is they see more and more around them, but feel frustrated with their art skills. So most people give it up. As a matter of fact, that is exactly the time, art teacher can really help. I am happy to see many of my young students making progress.
You haven't seen much of my painting lately. Well there are many thing to talk about that. I will get back to you soon.
8 comments:
Right there with you on your thoughts. Everybody should start by developing drawing skills. Everyone wants to bypass this and paint. What lucky kids getting to take from you!! Kudos to you for taking the time.
Qiang,
I praise your determination to defy attitudes in today's art education towards not teaching skills to children. I was a teacher of art for 43 years, beginning as a high school teacher. I fought my entire career for teaching skills to students at a young age and am saddened by art educators' inability to move in this direction.
I wish you only success in the approach you are using teaching children,
Good on you Qiang for teaching Children. That`s the way to go. All the best with that.
Vic.
Such a competent and well-observed drawing for a 15 year old...your son has clearly inherited your talent Qiang!
You´ve got an artist at home; you know it, aren´t you?
:)
Good teacher!
Nice to see your son's wonderful drawing. I taught art in high school for a while and totally agree with your thoughts. That is the stage that many students want to give up. I've always believed seeing and drawing is fundamental to any further art endeavors. I found many of the lessons from Betty Edward's book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" to be helpful. She emphasizes learning to really see. After doing some of these lessons many students seemed to have an "aha" moment and then there was no stopping them.:)
That is exactly what happened to me... I stopped drawing as a teenager because I was convinced that I couldn't draw and I would never be able to draw properly... I only picked up my pencil ate age 33 and I've more than often thought how good I could have been now if I hadn't given up on drawing as a teenager. Art just wasn't around me in the 80s
Bless you.. you are right.. and you may now have given me the missing link in the education of our artists that I have been trying to verbalize over the years. No wonder there is such a void.Thank you again
Post a Comment