"More thought about teaching art to children"

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.

"Cast Drawing"

I have just completed my week long engineering project and come back to art. Since I have no painting to share today, I would like to show you something else. This is a pencil drawing, not by me though. Can you tell who did this. Right, some of you can figure it out. It was done by my dear wife, Song. She took a drawing class at the local Gemini School of Visual Art. Her teacher was a wonderful artist and a very good friend of mine. His name is Denny Grant. She spent about 24 hours in 6 sessions on this drawing. I was amazed by her value control and subtle details she depicted. Danny's class follows the traditional academic approach. I highly recommend that all painters should do at least one of this kind of drawing. It helps tremendously on your sensitivity of shapes and value.