From the first lecture with Dairmuid the first thing that stuck in my mind was the degree of teacher involvement when it comes to the creative arts. Teaching kids about famous artists and their styles is great but when children are set tasks to reproduce a painting producing carbon copies of each other it can be rather counterproductive. As good as it is letting children explore different art styles schools should be letting them integrate the styles into their own work instead of using coping and comparing to the original and/or peers’ work.
I loved the lecture we had this week about reading paintings/pictures and using homemade paintbrushes. It was a method I have never really thought of doing before and I thought it was brilliant as it allows children to go off on their own creative directions. With the teacher providing a base for the children to begin it’s amazing where the lack of context can lead people, for example Dairmuid just gave us a boat on a green/blue sea, sky with wispy clouds and a buoy; where some people painted an actual buoy without seeing the spelling of the word others painted a boy swimming in the sea. Linking back to an earlier input where we discussed different interpretations of artwork/concepts it reinforced how people see things in a number of perspectives – there is no one right answer.
Not only this it can be completely cross curricular, the ‘paint brushes’ we used were made from sticks and various materials but depending on the class topic it could be made out of anything. Using sticks, moss/grass clumps, stones for printing etc could tie into an outdoor topic on wildlife and habitats that the kids could collect when out and about finding and observing different kids of wildlife in the school grounds. Although there may be similarities in the work where the kids may all focus on the same part of a topic to paint/create at least they will have picked that object themselves and even then they will vary a lot from one another instead of all looking the exact same.
