Am I from planet Mars?

Just finished a challenging course outdoors, my first with an all-American adult audience. Challenging not quite because of the material covered, but because I had to fight lots of my own demons. I realized that after some twenty plus years living in the US - I still felt inadequate in communicating in English. I felt again like a newly arrived immigrant from planet Mars. Why? Are we forever plagued with self-doubt if there's no land to call one's own?

It's the little cultural differences that struck me and wouldn't let me move beyond them. Participants not wanting to be close together, seeking solitary time instead. People not wanting my communal blanket, my tables and paint tubes brought to share, my Dale Carnegie inspired chitter-chatter about their everyday lives.

When indoors with a Russian-speaking group it's all about wanting to have good company, sharing some therapeutic insights into our lives and the world outside, taking my lead into exploring how our creative outcomes tell us something about things needing attention in real life.

Or is this just two sides of my own personality wanting to fight it out, clashing in their goals? Part of me wants a great tight group of friends to share in the experience of finding myself. Yet, another part wants some alone time, to reflect and come to my own conclusions, without someone's five cents in the process. Was this experience merely a mirror into how we all struggle to find our true self?

Barcelona as inspiration - teaching children to view the world differently

I was lucky to finally make it back to Barcelona, Spain, a city where so many greats had started, and which even today proves to be a place of inspiration and innovation.

What had impressed me the most this time around (last time of course Antoni Gaudi was the focus) was the Fundacio Joan Miro, which I had missed on my last trip to the city.

I was especially taken with the incredible accomplishments of its education department. In the course of a few hours that we spent there, there were at least 4 different school groups passing through, beginning with pre-school aged children, and all the way to high schoolers. I went to the museum not only because I'm fond of Miro's work, but also because I was unsure as to how to approach Joan Miro with kids. How does one introduce abstract art with ease to different aged students?

What I had learned was that it's best to let them interact with the work as much as possible and use their imaginations to complete its meaning. Each of the tours I  had encountered, and unfortunately my Spanish was lacking to fully understand them, was nothing like I had ever seen in museums in US, where museum docents are simply being informative. Tour guides sought to encourage each student to communicate what he/she thought they were looking at, meanwhile carefully extracting what it was the kids were feeling as spectators while engaging with each piece, or color, or symbol.

We also spent a bit of time watching a video on Miro's life and work, and his goals for the foundation. His main idea behind the endeavor was to teach people a new way of looking at things. I believe the goal is certainly being accomplished there and should serve as a motto for every art teacher...inspiring kids to view the world through their own lense...

Tips for Parents: How to tell your child's work is created by your child....and not the instructor

Disclaimer: My sincere apologies in advance to instructors, who are focused more on results for the parents, rather than the creative process with the kids. I tend to subscribe to the camp of creativity, rather than perfection. Sometimes our end results aren't understood by the powers at be at the end of each class. However, it is important for me personally to know that the child had worked on the project himself, and there's natural development in his/her skills, rather than a forced vision of the world by the instructor.

So onto to the task at hand. I've been asked multiple times to assess how much involvement a child might have had with a particular finished product. Though surely some little artists are more talented than others at a certain age, here're age related benchmarks for physical development. These developments  had been witnessed in classes, but are initially based on the research by the famous Child Psychologist, Viktor Lowenfeld:









Age 3-4: Most children are still scribbling and some might begin to develop basic shapes, mostly circles. They have no concept of space or planes within a picture, or a developed human figure representation.

Ages 4-5: Shapes of objects are geometric, they float in space and sizes/proportions are subjective and distorted. Human form is being developed, starting from head/feet symbol, followed by inclusion of arms, lots of details will still be missing.



Ages 6-8: A form concept is developed but doesn't change much, base line establishment but no understanding of overlapping (tree in front of house), human figure consists of geometric shapes, no proportions.



Ages 9-11: Events are characterized rather than drawn realistically, no understanding of shadow, there's a beginning of relationships between objects, lots of details in the figure, but greater stiffness

Ages 12-14: Wrinkles and folds might be important, can zoom in or out, still only important elements drawn in detail, attempt at perspective, greater awareness of joints and body actions, sexual characteristics overemphasized

Ages: 15-17: Will begin to show light and shade, imaginative use of figure for satire, expressiveness and awareness of atmosphere.