A matter of style

Teaching Pre K-8, Aug/Sep 2002 by Healy, John W

John W. Healy on

Art CURRICULUM THAT WORKS

Explaining artistic style to your students gets easier with help from their personal signatures.

I'm so pleased to have been asked to write a column for Teaching K-8. I'd like to begin by talking a little bit about how I look at, and think about, art, so you'll have an idea of where I'm coming from.

As a child, I thought I'd be happiest and live a good life if I could just make art every day. Now that I'm an adult and many of my days are filled with thinking about, planning for and creating original works of art, I've learned that, for me, creating art is a component of a good life, but it is not a complete life. Sharing with others the experience of expressing oneself through art contributes to my sense of completeness, and that's why I'm in art education.

We're all special

Identifying the unique qualities in each of my students is the first step I take in creating a learning environment that fosters self-expression. Through visual art and the written word, creative self-expression leads to originality.

Have any two people had the same set of life experiences? Of course not. Each of us is a unique mix of genealogy, experiences and interests. When self-expression is inhibited, we're deprived of our identity. Creative experiences promote our understanding of our own individuality and accentuate the value of our uniqueness to others.

Starting simply

A good curriculum in art, as well as other subject areas, should take students from simple to increasingly more complex tasks. The arts - both visual and performing - may seem to be a difficult area of human endeavor to understand. Discussing a painting by a famous artist, for example, can be a daunting task if a student doesn't have at his or her disposal some practical models for learning which provide a roadmap for exploration of, and participation in, the arts.

Learning from family

My first memories of my grandfather are of a tall, thin, kindly man who smoked a pipe and wore plaid flannel shirts. His friends called him "Jack." After retiring from the postal service, he had a great deal of free time which he spent, of course, drawing and painting, as well as working in his beautiful garden. I'd wait what seemed like an eternity for him to rise from bed at 10 or 11 a.m., and then we'd go out and "make things."

My father was an attorney and lived a different kind of life. He was bright and outgoing, but he'd come home from court with the emotions of his workday expressed in color and lines across his forehead. As a child, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I could go from childhood to retirement, without having to go through what comes in between. Clearly, for me, art education was the choice that gave me the time and the financial base to create art and, most importantly, to share these experiences with others.

An unexpected teacher

Over the course of his lifetime, my grandfather created hundreds of drawings and paintings. Grandpa gave these paintings to people he liked; to my knowledge, he never sold one. I have a group of these paintings that range from some of his earliest works to the very last paintings he created. It's difficult for me to express in words how important his paintings are to me. I've spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how he painted so well.

As a child, I was aware that Grandpa's older paintings were somehow different from the newer ones I watched him create. In later life, his hands had a slight tremor and this condition affected his brushstroke and handwriting. Since my grandfather lived to be 101, I could see how his style had evolved over the years, even though the word "style" wasn't in my vocabulary at the time. The differences I saw in his earlier paintings, as compared to his later paintings, were elements of his style, unfolding and changing.

My grandfather, without meaning to, taught me about style. His drawings and paintings were my first models for looking at and thinking about an artist's personal style.

Taking it into the classroom

The first model I use with my students is their signatures, since each person's signature is unique. Our signatures are a representation of our personal styles.

Style in art is a personal expression of self, a means of being distinguished from other artists. Elementary school children are shown the cursive writing chart and are asked to form their script letters as closely as possible to the letters on the chart. As the children become comfortable with forming the letters, they begin to deviate from the standard letter forms shown on the chart. They begin to form letters in unique ways. They develop a personal style of handwriting.

Each of our signatures is unique, and that uniqueness has great value, even in everyday situations. Try holding a class discussion about the ways our signatures are used. We can access money from the bank or an investment using our signatures. Our signatures make legal documents binding. Our signatures in a birthday card can make someone we care about feel special.