We've gone through the stencils and the grisaille painting for Art 2's, and are on to bigger and longer term oil paintings for all of the advanced levels.
In Art 1 we are beginning our first forays with color, and will begin truly brainstorming what we will create with our first painting over the next couple of class periods.
Below are just a few photos of some of the things we have been up to. I hope to have a quickly edited video soon, so stay tuned...just don't hold your breath. Please.
"I literally hate this rock, but I know the more that I work on it the better it will get."
A student working on her painting - before school - to a peer this morning. That's a good way to start the day, what with such a positive mindset and all.
"The Daily Splice was started early in 2015 as a platform to share my
analogue collage work, created using free weekly London magazines.
There’s an immediacy to the work in which current topics, trends and
affairs are given new context, turning something disposable into
something of permanence."
Find something that is discarded by someone else, and make something fantastic out of it. What a great goal/objective/direction.
Since we are all getting in to our oil painting lesson(s), and since I just ran across this post, I thought I would direct your attention to these paintings since they are portraits...there are a few great close up images...and there are some wonderful ideas.
So here is Meghan Howland on The Jealous Curator.
As we'll be going over Jeff Koons in all of the advanced classes I thought I would link to a couple of interesting articles here.
The first comes from Vice, that you can read HERE, and the second from Time.
Above you'll see the image you need to draw for this month's worksheet before taping it in your sketchbook, and below you'll see Mr. Koons and a few select pieces of his art.
Because of my previous recommended reading, you had to know that when I saw this article staring back at me last week at my local Peet's, that my interest would be piqued.
Apparently the Obama administration has a new College Scorecard out. In all that this scorecard does, it certainly doesn't get to the "heart of the matter" in terms of telling you which institutions are "better" for your student/you. It certainly has a bias to it - which is unfortunate.
You should definitely read the entire article by James Stewart, and I'm really glad that he got the paycheck that the Scorecard focuses on out of the way and got someone to deal with "value added" colleges.
When that is done - because all of those liberal arts majors add so much to our society (really, would you want to live someplace where everyone was a scientist or engineer???), I find it interesting that there is yet another system that gives completely divergent rankings than even Scorecard or the woeful and highly flawed US New & World Report rankings.
The "top schools" become: Cogate, Carleton, Washington and Lee, Westmont, and Kenyon for the first five. The highest ranked Ivy was Brown at no. 45.
Wild.
And the article closes with what is clearly the best quote coming from Jerry Z. Muller - who has studied the misuse of metrics in his research - saying that an obsession with college graduate earnings "is just the most recent example of a larger phenomenon, which is that the gathering of numerical information acts as a kind of wish fulfillment. If you have enough metrics and benchmarks, somehow people believe that's going to solve a major problem. It rarely does."
For those of you parents that were at back to school night I mentioned some of the books that have been on my "recently read" list.
One of the big highlights was by Frank Bruni and is Where yYou Go Is Not Who You'll Be so I thought I would put a link to it here in case you are interested.
Another book that I am still in the middle of, but is fantastic, is by a speaker I had the pleasure of hearing at a Challenge Success event at Stanford a few weeks ago. Below I'll put the link for Teach Your Children Well by Madeline Levine.
Both are excellent books and completely worth your time.
Last Friday I had the pleasure of attending an event at Stanford which was hosted by Denise Clark Pope and Challenge Success. One of the speakers was Tony Wagner and one of the many things he mentioned was a film he worked on called The Finland Phenomenon.
Finland consistently has the highest ranked educational system in the world, and it is radically different than ours in the states. I am not a big fan of numbers, but because their system is so different than ours it piqued my interest. Enough that I found the documentary on youtube and want to share it with you.
One of the other fun takeaways from the evening is something that is so true but none of us parents really want to acknowledge.
Since I'm not a big fan of reducing our students to a pile of numbers, this is a statistic that kind of made me laugh - because I know you don't want to hear it.
Your kid is average.
That's the blunt and un-sugar-coated version. But statistically speaking, most kids are. That's how statistics/averages work. Some are exceptional, some aren't. Most are "just" average.
My takeaway is that this doesn't comment on the fantastic-ness of your offspring, but in terms of grades, tests, college entrances - you know, those things that too much emphasis is put on and which don't really reveal that much about your kid (our students) - most kids are average. They have to be.
Not warm and fuzzy, but true.
Wow. That makes this end kind of negatively...which isn't my goal.
Working hard and having empathy and challenging yourself are way more important qualities for me to help you instill in your kids, and are much more a determiner of their success and happiness anyway. So there is that.
Before you know it, National Portfolio Day will be here.
As usual, and per the calendar, they will have a San Francisco edition. If you are considering putting a portfolio together and/or applying to an art school in the future, I would encourage you to attend this event.
Even if you are just curious as to what this is all about, or want to see if it might be something for you in the future, you can at least make a day of it and have some fun.
Who knows, maybe you go load up on the best pain au chocolat ever at Tartine before and/or after. That's always a good idea.
