Rod Taylor’s Process, Form, Content and Mood
Creative skills developed through the arts are critical in allowing for a creative process. This module enabled us to experience this by taking into account the questions prompted by the Rod Taylor model of assessment. This model is used to describe diverse pieces of artwork.
This mood and creative process provided an opportunity to evaluate the artwork, not just on first appearances, but consider aspects such as process and mood together with the ability to engage the imagination in order to explore new prospects (Eisner, 2002).
Below is the image I was provided with and beneath that is the evaluation sheet I followed.
I believe that this woman conveys the emotion of happiness and has confidence within herself. Although, her hair is dark her facial features are bright and colourful suggesting she has great confidence to wear such bright colours. Also, the bright yellow circle in the middle of her chest, to me, conveys the emotion of happiness within her heart. The colour yellow creates the impression of sunshine and joyful thoughts. From following Rod Taylor’s model of assessment, it provides us with the chance to evaluate this piece of artwork, and look beyond the picture and instead consider the emotion or story within it.
Print Making
Printmaking is an activity which many teachers avoid due to the ‘mess’ that can occur. However, it is a fun and engaging way of teaching children a new skill.
The class as a whole were given the same stimulus, a painting of an old Glasgow townhouse. The painting was extremely detailed, in every window of the house there was a story behind it. the idea was to focus on a particular part of the house for our print instead of the image as a whole. The painting is known as “Windows in the West” and was created by Glaswegian Avril Paton. The video below is Avril explaining more about her painting and how the inspiration for the painting arose.
At first, we used polystyrene boards and carefully sketched an outline of our chosen area of the painting using a ball-point pen. Children may find this difficult as if they make a mistake they can not rub it out but must continue on with their piece of artwork. This teaches children that in life everything can not be perfect but we can still make something beautiful out of it. The polystyrene board became our print template which we covered in paint to create our final print. This task highlighted the importance of creativity, and that just because several people will have a print that may have different colours from you or look different does not mean theirs is right and yours is wrong.
Below are images of the task being implemented.
