Perpich residency, 6 hours, MIA residency, 6 hours
This week was MCADs spring break, and due to a couple of prior scheduling conflicts (snowstorms!) I ended up doing both my Perpich and MIA lessons this week. Along with some other work I had going over break, it made for a full week but was nonetheless very fulfilling, invigorating and exciting, and a good reminder of why I really want to do this work.
I started the week with my lesson on CMYK color separations for screen printing at Perpich on Monday. To provide some visual and textual aids for my lesson, I had done a series of four process prints, in which each print had another successive CMYK layer printed on it. I also wrote up a pretty extensive packet with an introduction on CMYK screen printing, step by step instructions on what I demoed, and various other tips and info. I printed a number of copies and distributed them to the students, as what I was demoing is a pretty technical and involved process. We started class that day with the demo after Jeremy gave a general intro, and it went better than I could have even hope for. I ended up with about 10 students in total (all of the media arts students in the class) along with Lynda and Jeremy in the computer lab to give my demo. I ran through the process for splitting images into CMYK files and then converting these files into halftone patterns to allow them to be screen printed. The process itself can be a little bit dry or tedious, but all of the students seemed to find the demo pretty compelling. They found ways to relate what I was talking about to their personal practices, asked inquisitive questions about ways to experiment with the technique and generally seemed excited and compelled by the content I was presenting. After the demo, I worked with one of the students to guide him through the process for a photo he wanted to screen print as well. This lesson was maybe a bit unusual in that I was just presenting a technique; there was no actual making or immediate physical outcome involved, it's something they could use for their final projects. A number of the students we worked with were talking about using the technique already though, so I am excited to see their work in the coming weeks.
At the other end of the week, on Saturday I gave the lesson I had been working on with Witt for MIA's Creative Saturdays classes. We had been kind of co-planning the lesson based on themes established by the museum, and settled on having the students build dioramas with painted backdrops, and populate them with fantastical creatures or figures made from cardboard and similar materials. We also switched up the format for the lesson a little bit. We started the students off with a look at a couple of impressionist paintings (Monet and Van Gogh) in the galleries in order to talk about atmosphere, color, and scene-setting. After that, we went back down to the studio for the students to paint the backdrops for their dioramas. Their use of color and technique made it immediately obvious that they had absorbed and paid attention to what we'd looked at; many were using a variety of colors with one overriding tone, like in Monets Haystack paintings, while others imitated impressionistic brush techniques with watercolor. After some work time, we went back into the galleries where I gave a tour of some sculptural works to talk about form, scale, material and content. In working with Witt, I had decided to look at Yuji Honbori's Eleven Headed Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, Alexander Calder's Ahab, William Hunt Dietrich's Cock or Chanticleer and Sowah Kwei's Fantasy Coffin. Honbori's work was key in that it was a realistic figurative piece made from cardboard and recycled materials and thus somewhat connected to what the students would be making. The other three works all focus on animals or fantasy creatures, and allowed me to discuss scale, manipulation of raw materials and stylistic choices. After the tour, we brought the students back down to the classroom to create figures to populate their scenes. Each student was given a sheet of cardboard and a variety of drawing materials. They could draw creatures or characters on the cardboard, and myself, Witt or one of the other adults in the room would help them cut it out and engineer a way for it to stand up in their scene.
The double tour setup and high volume of materials used definitely made for a fast paced class, and we had students working up to the very end of of the class. However, we all agreed that the fast pacing and two tour setup actually worked pretty well. The standard format for these classes is an introduction, tour and then work time, which although nice and relaxed does sometimes get a bit tricky when you have antsy young artists or students finishing at different times. This format kept everyone moving and engaged, as we were constantly moving, looking at or making something. Nothing felt rushed, but there wasn't any time to spare either. The only thing I (and this was echoed by Witt) maybe would have changed was being a bit more definite with the materials we used; we had a general idea and lots of stuff set out, but we could've been a bit more specific or focused and probably have been even more successful.