Perpich residency - 1 hour, MIA residency - 6 hours, shadowing Drew Peterson at Juxtaposition Arts, 30 minutes (offsite meeting)
This week served as the introductory week to both of my residencies and my shadowing placement for the Practicum. On Wednesday, I met with Jeremy Lundquist a printmaking teacher at Perpich Center for Arts Education, who I'll be working with for one of my residencies. On Friday, I had a short meeting with artist and teaching artist Drew Peterson, who I'll be shadowing at Juxtaposition Arts. Saturday was my first actual teaching experience of Practicum, where I was on site at MIA working with educators and artists Witt Siasoco and Michael Gaughan for MIAs Creative Saturdays program.
My meetings with Jeremy and Drew didn't involve any actual teaching, but we went over what I'll work with, their expectations, how I'll be able to help and what the experience might look like. Being back at Perpich was (and will be) interesting as it's where I graduated from high school, and I'm excited to work with youth that age that feel dedicated and excited by art. Meeting with Drew was productive as well; we discussed what I'll be shadowing him for at Juxta, as well as talking about our art practices outside of teaching; we both come from printmaking and screen printing in particular, but experiment with a variety of different media.
Saturday was my first real day on site at MIA, working with artist and educator Witt Siasoco to help with their Creative Saturdays drop in art class program for kids. The day was broken into two halves, with the morning class being students 10 or under, and the afternoon class being students 8-12 maybe. Both classes were facilitated by Witt and local artist Michael Gaughan to teach the students about figure drawing. Topics Michael particularly stressed were looking at the alignment of the body and the way its weight falls. We took the students on a tour of the MIA galleries to look at a couple of figurative sculptures, and came back to the classroom to work on traditional gesture, contour and blind contour drawings from models (the models being myself, Witt, Michael and other employees that were present!). The key points of this lesson were twofold, I think; draw without being precious, and really look at your subject. These are hard techniques for young artists to absorb; it's natural to want to make good drawings and to look at your media and substrate when you work. This was difficult at first, and some students were vocal. By the time we got to the final drawing, which was blind contour, the mood had shifted. We taped paper over the students boards so they could still draw, but could not look at their paper without removing the cover sheet. These drawings in many ways were the most successful ones, in terms of composition, visual interest and accuracy or realism, even more so than the drawings where they could look at the paper.