gideon rubin inspired self portrait pillows

Have I mentioned what a huge fan I am of the work of Contemporary Artist Gideon Rubin?

This will be the second time I have introduced his work to children at the studio. The first time was with this printmaking project.

This time I had the young artist who were participating in the Contemporary Art themed camp focus on creating a self portrait inspired by Rubin. Also after hearing loud and clear from the campers in the Textile and Paint camp that they would love to do more work on pillows and such to put on their bed, I had the children create their inspired Rubin self portraits on canvas bags that I then turned into pillows.

I always find it interesting how children respond to his work. The idea that the facial features are left off the piece is difficult for some of them to accept, for others there is a great relief knowing they won't have to face the challenge of getting their eyes, nose and mouth correctly in the portrait.

Each child created a sketch on paper and once they were happy with their sketch, we transferred it onto the canvas bag using graphite paper. They then began adding acrylic paint that was watered down slightly, to help it move easier, onto the bag.

The results were lovely and caught the essence of each child perfectly.

9 year old

If you knew this young girl, you would be amazed at how accurately she captured the posture of how she holds her shoulders and the essence of her hair. There is no doubt who this portrait belongs to when you know the child.

7 year old

10 year old

The same can be said for these two young artist also.

7 year old

Of course some children needed to add their own twist to their portraits! Like these bunny ears added to this sweet portrait. And yes, her hair is that long and thick! 

9 year old

And then there were the two young artist who could not deal with not having facial features. I think he captured his feelings about my encouraging words to capture their portraits without facial features. 

He was not amused.

6 year old

The youngest artist did not want a pillow. She was quite excited to have a bag to carry to school. And no, I have not reversed the image. I am always impressed when children write their names so easily backwards! I don't know what possesses them to do it but she did that freehand and I think that is no easy task to do. She has this beautiful head of curly locks and I just smile at the way she decided to interpret this feature in paint.

I hope the kids enjoy these pillows for years to come. It was a lot of fun watching the kids create them.

conceptual art inspired by Matt Browning and Michael Drebert

During the Contemporary Art themed camp week, I decided to share a couple of artist I discovered while leading school group tours through the Vancouver Art Gallery's Vancouver Special:Ambivalent Pleasures exhibition.

Surprisingly I discovered that children really responded to conceptual art where the idea is more important than the result and were fascinated by the artwork of Matt Browning's collapsable wood sculptures carved from one piece of wood!

Matt Browning. untitled 2014

You read that right, one piece of wood! The time and labor that went into these works was mind boggling and kids were duly impressed. Browning's idea of creating sculptures that took time resonated with a generation of children where everything is available to them instantly, including the ones in my art camp.

The other artist in this room at the exhibition the children were excited about was Michael Drebert. Again working with the idea of labor and time, he refurbished a boat he called Poppy, built some oars, and then rowed out to Flower Island each day for the summer. At the end, he painted a very large but simple graphic poppy symbol on paper in india ink to represent the task and journey.

I liked the idea of presenting a project that took time, even if it was just a week of time during the camp. But I also worried that the children would not respond well to the project as there would be no instant gratification. 

I decided to have them spend the week building rubber band balls. I love my own. I have been adding to it for the past 7 years every time I get a rubber band from the weekly neighborhood newspaper delivered to my door or on the vegetables I purchase at the grocer. It is now the size of a softball and my family knows not to mess with one of my most coveted possessions.

I shared my rubber band ball with the kids, discussed the artwork of Browning and Drebert, and introduced creating a conceptual artwork based on labor and time.

Beyond my wildest imagination I could not of anticipated how much the kids would enjoy building a rubber band ball. Several of them asked to take the project home at night in order to continue adding rubber bands to the ball.  I was thrilled and where I thought four bags of rubber bands would be more than enough before the kids lost interest in the project, I ended up buying another five bags and would of needed more had the week not ended.

They were not easy to start. I did not give the kids a wadded up piece of paper to begin wrapping with, these are made strictly from rubber bands. Where I worried kids would want to give up or get frustrated at the beginning as starting the balls was challenging or get bored with the repetitive task of adding endless rubber bands to build the ball was all for nothing. Of all the projects the children created, I believe these balls were what they left the studio with most excited and proud of that week.

After building these rubber band ball "sculptures" inspired by Matt Brownings' wood carvings, it was time to create a symbolic artwork of the labor inspired by Michael Drebert.

I put out india ink, brushes and quill pens. We discussed symbolic drawings and then I sat back and watched these young artist figure out a way to symbolically represent their rubber band balls they had worked so hard on all week.

7 year old

9 year old

A couple of children created strong, simple black line images in keeping with Drebert's work but others began to add their own details and twist.

10 year old

9 year old

Adding shadow, color

6 year old

and even action to their artwork!

7 year old

Do I think these artworks will end up framed in their bedrooms? no

Do I think the balls are displayed and coveted at home? yes

And do I think these young artist walked away having had fun discovering conceptual contemporary artist and exploring creating work where the idea was more important than the results? absolutely

Betty Woodman inspired acrylic and clay mixed media

A couple of months ago I completed a week art camp focused on Contemporary Art. The children ranged in age from 6 to 10 years old.

Contemporary Art basically means any art created in the last 30 years and I think it is important for children to understand that all artist are not dead or lived a long time ago. That there is a vibrant and exciting art community today for them to discover.

I tried to highlight some artist that they and probably their parents have not heard of before too. Also trying to spice it up a bit for me as I would have to create new projects and learn some new facts about some artist I have been interested in but maybe didn't know a lot about.

I do try to highlight a large variety of mediums in art camps and of course one is clay. I began researching some contemporary artist working in clay and kept coming back to Betty Woodman.

Especially the works where she is incorporating paintings with her ceramics.

9 year old

The work was colorful and full of pattern. I had a sneaky suspicion that these two things would really resonate with the kids. She also had some very interesting work that highlighted negative space, you can see one of the young artist also found it interesting too as he created a mirror image of his ceramic using negative space.

7 year old, "windowsill sillies"

We looked at a series of her artworks together and the kids all had an opportunity to really look and discuss what they saw in the work. We then talked about some of the elements they could use to create their artwork inspired by Betty Woodman.

7 year old "dill pickle"

I was so impressed with how the young artist interpreted what they saw in Woodman's art in their own original creations.

10 year old "wall sconce"

They embraced the use of vibrant colors and created all their own colors using a primary palette.

7 year old, "where did that butterfly go?"

They enjoyed playing with pattern and repetition too.

9 year old, "garden vase"

And they fully committed to adding clay elements to their artworks and enjoyed solving the puzzle of how to incorporate clay into a painting.

It was a fun project that the kids seemed to really enjoy. The icing on the cake was the marvelous results they all achieved in the end.

O'keeffe inspired acrylics

How could I do a camp themed on doing everything supersize and not utilize Georgia O'Keeffe for the acrylic project?

10 year old

We spent some time looking through a large book I have of all her flower paintings. We debriefed several of the artworks and the kids had a lot of insightful things to say.

6 year old

6 year old

Each child was given a large canvas to use for their creation and I cut flowers and leaves from my backyard for reference. For fun I gave each of them some white gesso with a palette knife and a piece of cardboard to experiment creating texture on their canvases before painting.

We did this at the end of the camp the day before so it had time to dry by the next morning.

7 year old

They had the option to focus on one leaf, one flower or several from the bunches I brought into the studio.

6 year old

They mixed all their own colors from a primary palette with black and white.

8 year old

Although it would be cool, I do not have carnivorous plants in my backyard. This child utilized the file cabinet full of reference for this painting. However the addition of the spider was all his own!

9 year old

Love how each child interpreted the project and the wide variety of flower paintings we had at the end.

9 year old

large ink bird drawings on rice paper

Everything was supersize in the Supersize It! art camp.

So instead of cutting up the large sheets of rice paper, the kids created ink paintings using a full size sheet.

So we are talking very big pieces of paper.

Using India Ink and a sumi-e brush, the young artist created a gestural ink drawing  of a bird and then using colored inks painted their drawings.

Although they used reference, I encouraged them to create birds from their imaginations.

I love the way they turned out. They are so vibrant and full of so much personality.

Some children realized that although they thought they were drawing their birds big, they in fact were still drawing small for the size of the paper and were left with a lot of negative space.

But what an incredible opportunity that turned out to be to figure out a way to problem solve what to do next and really resolve it with some amazing new compositions they hadn't first thought about doing. I love how the addition of the branch adds interest to the flying bird's movement and how one of the youngest artist added additional birds to a wire to create a repetitive pattern to the one original small bird she placed on the paper.

This brushes of blue around this bird with the nod to a tree on the right is quite brilliant. When I look at this I can hear Picasso's quote of how adult artist are always trying to draw like children as would we with all our training have the courage to just place a couple of brushstrokes of blue to represent sky next and a quick stroke of green for tree to frame a bird?

I was quite impressed with all the kids compositions to be truthful. I think just trying to manage reaching the full paper from top to bottom led to some choices they would not of made normally.

A couple of children really worked with creating an abstracted version of a bird from real life. LOVE this woodpecker!

And this Dodo bird?! The only thing better than the picture is the conversation that happened while he was painting it. He went on and on about how he wished he could see a Dodo bird. How sad it was that the bird is extinct. I thought that was so sweet and then he announced he wished they were still around so he could eat one because he wondered what they would taste like.

Not where I thought the conversation was going......out of the mouth of babes.

A couple of the kids wanted to explore the inks a little more after they finished their first artworks and I had some extra paper cuts for them to play with.

This one was created using a quill pen on rice paper instead of the semi-e brush. I don't know why, but I can absolutely see this as a tattoo.

And this boy just wanted to play with mark making and explore the strokes he could make with the brush.

Vibrant. Bold. Original. 

These paintings are some of my favorites to come out of the studio during the summer. I love how using the ink and brush along with the large paper helped the kids really open up their strokes and create some very loose drawings full of personality.

I'm sure I'll be coming back to these materials in the future.

large watercolor paintings

I ran an art camp where the theme was big.

Every single project was supersized.

"on the hunt" 8 year old

We started the week with very large watercolor paintings.

dragon, 9 year old

I suggested the subject matter be their favorite animal.

flying unicorn, 6 year old

pygmy puff, 7 year old

We discussed foreground, mid ground, and background as they sketched their compositions.

photobombing hamster, 7 year old

I asked them when faced with such a large piece of paper if their animals should be small?

Thankfully I got a resounding NO!!

eye of the dragon, 9 year old

I then offered up a challenge to draw their favorite animal SO LARGE that only a portion of the animal was on the paper with the caveat that this was only a suggestion and that it was up to them to make the artistic choice as to how they decided to compose their picture.

panda in bamboo forest, 6 year old

Each child then had a palette of primary colors along with black for painting so they could use the project to explore color mixing.

dragon war, 10 year old

The results are super fantastic!

textile and paint art camp

During the summer I decided to run a camp that combined textile and paint.

We started with this very fun project where the kids created pillows using canvas bags. I sure wish I could take credit for the genius idea of turning a plain canvas bag into a pillow but alas I cannot, I found the idea from Meri Cherry (yes that's her real name), a teacher I met through Instagram.

Seriously this world gets smaller by the day and you meet people in the most interesting ways. Meri Cherry has a studio in California and she does some very exciting things with young children. One of them was this very simple way to create decorative pillows.

You literally take a canvas bag, stuff it with some filling and iron it shut with sewing adhesive. Doable even for me, a woman who struggles to thread a bobbin.

I decided to have the young artists create an acrylic painting on a canvas bag instead of a traditional canvas, once the paint was dried gave the finished works a once over with a hot iron to set, then stuffed and ironed.

The kids LOVED them. They asked to do it again. I heard from all of them how much they enjoyed doing something other than painting on paper that they could use to decorate their rooms. Evidently their walls at home are getting too full to display more artwork, we should all have such problems....

I created a printmaking project where the kids created change pouches.

Each artist created a linocut to use for printing. I put out a variety of inks and let them have fun.  Interesting to watch how they decided to use their printing plate differently on each side of the pouch. Again, they all seemed very pleased to have a project on something other than paper. Who knew?

front

back

front

back

front

back

front

back

We used dyes and resist to create one of a kind t-shirts

And I introduced an artist I had seen at the Albertina Museum while traveling in the summer named Eduard Angeli. It was a retrospective of his work in honor of his birthday and these pastels on a hemp like fabric just about did me in, this bridge in particular. Is it not stunning?

artwork by Eduard Angeli

I think the security guard was equal parts concerned I was going to stick my nose right on the piece and amused at how smitten I was as I tried to figure out the process. If only we each had spoken the others' language, I'm sure he would of enlightened me much more on the process.

I find the security guards at the Vancouver Art Gallery are a wealth of information as they hear us touring adult and school groups through them all week.

Anyway, I had the kids create pastel drawings on linen. They couldn't resist adding some stitching since I 'framed' them in embroidery hoops. I think they came out lovely.

Love this abstract the youngest child created inspired by Angeli's work. She stitched some lines in with thread and then just enjoyed experimenting with the process of adding pastel on top. She began playing with adding some water with the pastels to see what would happen and the rest was magic.

And finally I gave the children the opportunity to paint with thread. Each child drew a picture onto their fabric and then began to fill in the drawing painting with embroidery thread. This was so popular they did not want to do anything else. Other than threading needles when they got frustrated with trying, there wasn't a whole lot for me to do other than enjoy time laughing and talking to them while admiring their artworks. Once in awhile they would ask me to show them a new stitch which at least let me feel like I was earning my pay!

And finally no week is complete without some kind of clay project and so I had them create a loom out of clay so they could try their hand at weaving. Pretty simple process, the outside could be any shape they wanted and the only parameters they had to adhere too was (1) to make sure the clay wasn't rolled out too thin. 

(2) They all used the same circle template to cut the middle out and they had to add either 15 or 17 holes- no more, no less.

 (3) And they had to have a fingers width between the opening of the circle and the weaving holes and a finger width between weaving holes and the outer edge of their clay. 

After we threaded the weft, I gave each young artist a variety of different textured white yarns to weave. Once finished they could add watercolor to paint the weaving. I should mention the kids were also able to paint their clay prior to wefting too.

As you can see, some chose to paint their yarns and some did not, but they all had fun and really enjoyed weaving. We could of made those clay frames double in size and I still think they would of wished they had more room to weave.

It was strange at the end of the week not to have the kids walk out the door with piles of artworks on paper. But like I said before, the feedback I received from several of them was they would like to do more textile and paint projects in the future. It was an interesting perspective to hear these kids desire to have more unique items to decorate their rooms with other than the tried and true paper.