Block-playing artists

Arts & Activities, March, 2004 by George Szekely

Building with everything around--foods, pillows and pots and pans--is a part of children's art history. The instinct to build with all forms becomes unappreciated as kids get older and enter a conceptual and less physically oriented world.

Block playing is basic to art experimenting, as children test art and design principles. A set of blocks is a basic art supply. Blocks are visible in early childhood classrooms, and art teachers have an obligation to save the vanishing blocks for later grades. As you enter my art class, LEGO[R] tables in each corner of the room welcome block players.

Along with LEGOS, there are Lock-Blocks, Magna-Sticks, Bristle Blocks, Link-its, Techno's and Pringles[R]. We collect and test most new and vintage block sets in our art room, but we also continue to support children's interests in playing with potato chips and found objects.

In fact, in one of the students' favorite trunks, pots and pans, lids, funnels, strainers, and other kitchen utensils rest. Even though adults lock the cabinet doors, kids don't cease to be interested in under-the-counter-style building. Art classes can extend the life of block players, who sketch out ideas and visions with blocks, until architecture school, where students regain respect for building with their hands.

BLOCK LESSONS Let the blocks stay in the art class as an essential art supply for self-discovering art. Equilibrium can be felt by balancing blocks. Soaring is experienced by building sky-high towers and skyscrapers. Construction and destruction in art is seen when blocks fall in a storm and student archeologists reconstruct their past.

Adventurous spanning of spaces is pushed to the limit in ruler constructions over art-room canyons and tables. Building walls and fences explores the sensation of enclosing space and forms. The solidity of a block is clear to designers filling playhouses and spaces with blocks as furniture. Laying out a sidewalk with bricks is an experience of pattern and sequencing with blocks.

Blocks make the experiencing of objects in the environment more tangible. They are also a tool to examine abstraction. Block-head constructions reduce the forms of a head to blocks. Our cubist life, living in block houses, driving block cars around block buildings, carrying block packages is best expressed in block layouts.

Children test and showcase their ideas in block prototypes. They set out blocks to furnish forts and playhouses and plan future stadiums for competing action figures. Block playing starts our art classes as students fearlessly explore ideas without erasing. Blocks become our models, our still lifes, our stories, our props, further explored in drawings, paintings or videos. After an art lesson, blocks are a memorable means of summing up, evaluating, and fantasizing beyond an art lesson.

SOFT BLOCKS A gathering of pillows in a home is akin to a lumberyard delivery for a builder. From my art-room pillow collection one can build a small mountain or improvise any other soft dream construction. Children who treasure soft friends also build with cotton balls, socks, shoulder pads, diapers, hats, and other soft forms they find around the house. Tub blocks adhere to each other when wet and gracefully flow in the gentle breeze of art-class play pools. Other soft blocks are manufactured by students stuffing all kinds of plastic bags. Reupholstering projects at home always mean a bounty of custom building blocks made from foam rubber pieces.

EDIBLE BLOCKS A chopping block was one of my daughter Ana's earliest block-forming devices. Our abundant apple harvest led to all kinds of edible blocks, original fruit plates, fruit construction over peanut-butter sandwiches, and edible building projects in school. Building with bananas made wonderful sculptural forms. When I notice a child successfully building with cereal, candy or crackers, it becomes a play block named Pringles[R], Wheat Thins[R], or Cheerios[R], stocked on the art-room shelf. How fortunate that crackers are packed in ready-made block sets. My cereal and snacks shopping is not always based on nutritional information or taste, but how well they perform in tabletop constructions.

BLOCK ROLLS Children celebrate each new purchase of toilet-paper packages by freeing all the rolls. Rather than worry, I bring in a pantry full of supplies to inspire a school-wide building celebration. Suggested by builders at home, paper-towel rolls are added to toilet-paper rolls, and juice, fruit and soup cans come along as solid bases on which to structure the paper roll monuments sprouting from the art-room floor.

INTERLOCKING BLOCKS Although most block plays produce temporary structures, children like LEGOS and Bristle Block type plays because the locking pieces secure their constructions. As an avid observer of children turning home chores into art, I find clues to art-room supply needs. Currently available interlocking pieces for my classroom builders include a thousand different clothespins, over a hundred electric plugs, a huge gathering of different combs, and a basket filled with PVC sprinkle-system parts.