The geography of us - art projects

Arts & Activities, Jan, 2003 by Geri Greenman

A recurring theme in my classes is the self-portrait. I think it's a viable subject that some may too often ignore. The model is convenient: someone we see everyday. Yet, oftentimes we fail to study the geography of the face. How our eyes are shaped. The length of our nose. The curve of our lips. We take for granted the unique shapes and contours of ourselves, as easily as we forget, or perhaps don't consider, our ancestry.

This semester, in my beginning drawing class, I wanted to achieve three things with this particular assignment: One, to have my students celebrate their own unique histories and diversities; Two, to have them achieve their own particular "look" or appearance; and, Three, test their ability to successfully draw themselves.

In preparation for this serf-portrait, I drew the features of the face on the board as the class and I discussed placement thereof, and the fact that there are no set of rules for drawing the features that are the same for anyone in particular. There are numerous ways of measuring and placement, but I have my own method, and frequently tell my students that this is a "generic person" that is being drawn on the board.

By starting out this way, their confidence is built through practice, and their observational skills are strengthened so that they will trust themselves to draw correctly while looking in a mirror (I avoid using photographs).

Once I had finished drawing the features on the board, I walked around the room to monitor the students' progress in drawing each of the features on their own paper. It always takes about three class periods for me to cover the head, placement and proportion, and also how to build the features. I include the features in profile, and three-quarter angle. This prepares the students to draw someone, in this case, themselves. But, it is just a start. It will, I hope, give them the impetus to continue practicing these skills, becoming confident in observing, so that they can draw people quickly and correctly.

After the "features lesson," I give them a "features quiz" that I designed, and must admit I am pretty proud of. To prepare the quiz, I spend lots of time cutting out eyes (one eye only, separated from its mate), noses and lips from fashion magazines. I then put them in separate paper bags, labeled "Eyes," "Noses," and "Mouths."

The students reach into each bag without looking, taking one eye, one nose and one mouth, and we tape these down on a piece of paper. Their job is, with just that little bit of visual information, to then create a face and head, making sure that it has those features, as well as a neck, ears, shoulders and hair that would "fit" those features.

If the eyes that a student draws are not "built" like the one taped to the paper, he or she didn't do well on the quiz. The difficult part of the quiz is that, oftentimes, one facial feature is from a three-quarter angle, another is frontal, and the third feature might be from an advertisement for lipstick and is HUGE compared to the size of the nose and eye. This is a good test of their skills and a real challenge!

After they finish the quiz, I introduce the self-portrait assignment. First, they are shown an example self-portrait that I have made and, more importantly, share with them the steps I took, and some of the thought-process I went through in making artistic judgment calls on placement and the like. I also point out to them that I am a typical American from the "melting pot," in that, on my mother's side, I'm a mixture of French, Irish, English, Belgian and Welsh, and on my father's side I'm all Italian. I then put my work away, because now, this was all about them.

First they wrote down what they knew about their ancestry, such as where their great-grandparents were from--on both sides of their family. In cases where a student was adopted or simply did not know anything about their ancestry, I suggested that they select Illinois or another state that was related to their history. In short order, each of my students were able to write down the countries and states that were a part of his or her background.

A few students had American Indian in their ancestry, so I encouraged them to use part of a map that indicated the states where that tribe originated. I brought an extra set of encyclopedias from home, which are invaluable in answering questions quickly (and keeping me from giving out erroneous information). One of my students is part Cherokee, so I suggested she use some Western state, but she said that she thought the tribe was from a Southern state. We looked it up and she was absolutely right: the Cherokee nation lived in Georgia and elsewhere in the South.

I had told my students that geography is one of my weakest subjects and that this assignment might help me learn more about it too. During this assignment, we walked over to two large maps that I had hung up--one of the world, the other of the United States--innumerable times to check where countries and states were located.