This past week Seymour Art Gallery in Deep Cove asked me to participate in their school outreach program. This is a program for local schools, where a classroom can come to the gallery for a private tour with the curator and then create an art project inspired by the current exhibition.
Four different school groups toured the gallery's 30th Anniversary show. The show was set up on a timeline with artist work on display based on when they first showed at the gallery. What a treat for the kids since several of the works exhibited were from the artist private collections.
The curator and I selected a work by Canadian artist Gordon Smith to inspire the art project.
Here is the Curator discussing Gordon Smith's work with some Grade 2 and 3 students. It was quite amazing all the different things the kids started seeing in the work the longer they looked at it. While the curator showed the students a video of the artist talking about his career, (Smith is 96 years old and still creates from 9-5 every day!), myself and one of the gallery volunteers set up a large sheet of paper in the gallery and placed down the first of many drawing tools the kids would use throughout the project.
I explained to the kids that we would be working on a project as a group for them to take back to their school. They could decide to display it at school as one piece or cut it up so each of them could take a part home.
I also went over the importance of line in artwork. We discussed how we use line to create letters to communicate, texture, emotion and rhythm in a work. Then referring back to Gordon Smith's artwork, I explained the difference between copying and being inspired by other artist. That for this project, we would be using not only Smith's work as inspiration but also music to interpret line and create a new and unique piece of artwork all their own.
We started with pencils, then moved on to ballpoint pens, graphite, erasers, and oil pastels.
We played a variety of music, Disney, classical, jazz, country, techno, pop and hard rock. Although all the music was just instrumental, more than once the kids began to sing along. EVERYONE knew "We will rock you" and without doubt, I believe it was the highlight of the musical numbers.
As you can see, the kids had a great time creating line on the paper. The results were quite exciting when it was all finished.
While the students got cleaned up, we took the opportunity to take some pictures of the works. The paper was quite large and below are some sections of the different works created by four school groups from Grade 2 through 5.
It was interesting to watch the students explore the variety of drawing tools we gave them. Each used them in their own unique way and they had a ball crawling into the paper to draw, creating very large strokes that overlapped their neighbors work, and having the pencil dance across the paper.
Lots of laughter and joy in the gallery and the student's excitement was contagious. I think Gordon Smith would be smitten to see all the fun he inspired in the gallery last week.
Happy 30th Birthday Seymour Art Gallery. Thank you so much for allowing me to be apart of such a wonderful place that inspires artist of all ages.
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