During our first art input we studied different levels of artwork through the primary school. The groups of art work were split up into 3 groups, lower, middle and upper primary. What I found when I studied each group that I was most drawn to the lower primarys work and I think this was because it had the most originality. McAuliffe states “As children become more aware of others art, they can begin to feel particularly self conscious about their work and their own ability in art and design.” McAuliffe, (2007).
Also as they got older it became more apparent that the children had been brainwashed into following a certain structure, painting and drawing the same things, in the same style. We discussed how a lot of the pictures looked as though they had been guided through the piece of work step by step by the teacher or they had been given an initial piece of work by the teacher to copy.
Gibbs states “Where art lessons do exist, they are more often presented as an exercise in following instructions with the entire class diligently following set instructions to produce near-identical pieces of work, all doing their best to copy the teacher’s example; expression, creativity and originality do not come into it.”
Personally I do not think this is a good thing as it does not allow children develop their own artistic style or create work based on their own ideas and experiences. Teachers should be doing more to support children’s individual creativity, rather than making them copy examples to produce replicas.
Fair enough, this approach would get them to understand shape, line, texture etc but it doesn’t allow them to develop their own approach to creating an image. We also discussed as a class how some of these limitations were probably to do with teachers not wanting to take the time to clean up afterwords, it is more convenient for them to use simple methods of art which are quick easy and won’t create mess.
These are two of my favourite pictures from the younger stages in the school.
The first because I feel it is obvious the child has had freedom to create what they wanted. There is no clear structure to it, it looks a lot like experimentation of colour and pattern. I like the second picture because it looks like the child has been able to experiment with texture.
References
Gibb, C. (2012) Room13: The movement and the International Network. Blackwell Publishing LTD
McAuliffe, D. (2007) Foundation and the Primary settings. In: Cox, S., Watts, R., Grahame, J., Herne, S. and MacAuliffe, D. (Eds) Teaching Art and Design 3-11 London: Continuum
