DB #4 Assessment

In every kind of learning situation one party is teaching and one is learning.  When students are learning what art is and how it’s done, having your work assessed is just as important as the process of doing the work.  In my experience learning happens best when you get feedback on your progress.  Feedback comes in many forms but in essence it is any response or reaction to an action.  For students feedback is their grades, comments made while working on a project, praise given once completed or any response to their work.  Some of the different ways to assess are critiques, rubrics, multiple-choice test, performance-based evaluation, and portfolios.  In my experience portfolio-based evaluations and critiques with my peers and teachers have been the most beneficial.  Every student responds differently so the more ways you have to assess them the greater the students chance to show what and to what degree they have learned.  At the beginning of a new unit or art process it is very important to have the students demonstrate their knowledge base.  After the unit is completed comparing their finished pieces to the first trials can show the growth of each person’s ability no matter where they started out.  A successful learning experience is the change, expanding, in understanding and an ability of show said change.   It will look different for every student and teacher. 

You can push against a wall until you’re blue in the face but until the wall moves nothing has been accomplished.  Good or bad feedback is the proof of the wall moving for me.  When creating art the ability to step back and be evaluated on what has been done enables me to move forward and make better work.  Talking with my peers in a work-in-progress critique or one on one with my teacher has been the most helpful assessment for my work.  If you are never told how you’re doing, how will you know to move forward?  I can’t count the number of times I have received a grade for something and not understood why the grade was not better or worse.   

For my lesson planning rubric assessment will be used.  This way the students have a clear understanding of what is expected, and through demonstrations of techniques and exemplars the students should be able to actuate a successful project.

Big Idea Book - Second Chances

    For my B.I.B. I chose the first subject matter that came to mind and for my life that is a second chance.  When you feel like you've been walking backwards for 6 years a second chance to start over is a Godsend.

The book itself is handmade out of pulp painted hand pulled flex paper.  I love color in my artwork and a fresh start always feels bright and new.  Making paper has always seemed like a reinvention of something plain into the extraordinary.  With a second chance anyone can be extraordinary!

Amber Ward was the first of my classmates to contribute to my BIB and I have to say I was some what apprehensive about giving my book away.  I think mostly because the pages already had so much work put into them and I had a very clear idea of what was going to be in my book. 

I was quite pleased when I read Amber's pages because her take on my BI was so different from my own interpretation but just as serious a topic.  Her artistic style seems to fit right into the book.

Jooyoung was the second contributor to my book.  Her take on second chances was another complete reinterpretation of my idea but probably the best one.  I started thinking about becoming a  teacher in high school because I wanted to work with kids.  Truth be told I wanted to have kids but at 16 I didn't see that happening anytime soon. 

 I turned to education because of the one on one interaction with the next generation.  If I can help a child avoid mistakes I've made or help them as they make their own than what little wisdom I've gained in life can be put to good use.  

If hind-sight is 20/20 than presently I feel like I'm blind.  A Second Chance is the opportunity to use the knowledge gained from past mistakes to create a better future.  It's about using that 20/20 vision and not giving up regardless of how hard that path may be.  The opportunity to start fresh, take a step back and evaluate what and how you know something, someone, somewhere.   Christ's blood has washed away my sins.  Start Anew!  Christ paid the ultimate price to give each man, woman, and child the chance to try again.

If I had never lost my sister I would never know how precious life time can be.  If I had never been put in a wheelchair because of an accident I would never have learned to be humble and truly appreciate my mother's help.  If I had never failed a class I would never know how hard it is to get an A.  If I had never gotten a speeding ticket, I would never learn to slow down.  If I had never waited tables to pay my rent, I would never understand how much money is really worth.  If I had never hit my head walking down the stairs I would never learn to duck.

Time, Humility, Blood, Sweat, and Tears 

My life over the past 7 years has been a world-wind; disaster zone; and even sometimes a psychiatric ward would have been more enjoyable, but sometimes finding the meaning/image lost in a composition enables you to find purpose, peace, understanding.  The trials of life will only make you stronger.  Once your demons are defeated and the struggles over you can look back triumphant and say "I'm still standing, I'm still here", "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me".  Find the beauty in Life's Chaos and start each day Anew!!

 

Impressions

For this week’s blog I choose the “River Bank” by Daniel Garber, an Impressionist painting from 1910.  Over the last four years I have been in the MUMAA more times than I can count and this piece has always stood out to me.  I feel as though the big idea behind River Bank is beauty, a moment of beauty that you can feel as much as see.  In the first part of the 20^th century artist began using oil paints en plein air, out of doors, for the first time with the advent of premixed tub paints.  Artmaking became portable which the Impressionist artist took full advantage.  These artists were interested in the quality of light and color and how each would change with the time of day.  They wanted to express emotion and movement as well.  

I would like to use Garber’s piece to inspire students to think about how emotion can be expressed in their own art work.  Using one emotion in particular the students would construct a piece which shows this emotion and has a strong sense of light, or the lack thereof.  Garber created a poetic and luminous image of the Delaware River with his “transient effects of light”.

Questions:  How does light effect the landscape?  How did he use the river to show light?  How would the piece be changed if Garber had painted it at dusk or evening?  The choosing of the medium can be just as important as the emotion.  What medium did the artist choose?  How important to the subject matter is the medium or how would the subject matter change if charcoal or water color were used?  Would the piece still express what the artist intended?

Students need the tools to understand how to create a strong image.  For River Bank a deep inspection of Impressionism and the ways in these artists thought about art compared to the way we see it today is vital to finding a deeper meaning in this piece.  One image can invoke very different responses from a group of people viewing it.  Beauty can have a million different definitions and interpretations.  Investigating what other people think of an image can inform upon your own work.  For the Impressionist the utensil with which an artist created a piece was just important as the time or day they work in. 

When I was in elementary school I started drawing the Looney Tunes characters from a deck of cards. What I was really doing was copying one particular image of a character and duplicating it at the 9x12 size.  At the time I was overjoyed at the ability to copy it exactly, but to this day I am not a cartoonist.  I can’t make up my own characters or even draw the ones that already exist that well.  I spent years duplicating someone else’s art instead of trying to find my own “voice”.  Being good or bad at art has nothing to do with how proficient you are at the “7+7” as Gude puts it.   Replicating exactly what you see is a skill not everyone has to be sure but it is not always called for.  Impressionism, expressionism, and a half dozen other isms have proved that time and again.  Having something to say and finding a way to express it through the artistic process, in my mind, is the makings of an artist.  As an art teacher I may never know every way a project could be executed or which technology could be most helpful.  I am able to show the students new ways of thinking with the use of past and contemporary artist work, and by encouraging them to conceptualize rather than draw three different kinds of line and two different tones. 

Art:21 - William Kentridge: Anything is possible.   

Several weeks ago I was told I am a very process driven artist.  That was a revelation of sorts for me, and not because I had no idea, but that I had always known and never taken the time to be aware of it.  The finished product is never what I set out to create but what happens along the way while trying to make something else entirely.  This is why I am so drawn to Kentridge.  His work is so powerful and steeped with such meaning and emotion that the overall work is immensely powerful, but one single image out of the hundreds of thousands he uses is nothing to write home about.  His lines are not delicately place in the exact right place but quick fast slashes leaving each mark precisely where needed as only an experienced and gifted artist could.  And as soon as the image is recorded he takes it away and makes a new one in it’s place.  Often when students are in the early stages of their art careers every line is important, any quote/unquote wrong line is devastating.  I would like to give a class the assignment of a blank page.  Meaning that when they turn in the finial image there would be nothing but an empty page with only the remnants of erased lines and a handful of pictures.  I think this would get the students thinking about more than the end result.