Desenhos Violentos, Violent Drawings

02-19-09
English

This Drawing was done by M. a 6-year-old boy. It is wrinkled because he was hidding the drawing and affraid of being repressed.
It took me a while to convince him to show me and to have an open conversation about it.


O desenho esta amassado porque ele estava escondendo o desenho por medo de represália. Levei um tempo para conseguir convencê-lo que não iria reprimi-lo por ser um desenho violento e depois conversamos um pouco sobre o tema.

Enquete:

When the children make drawings about violent themes as murders and war, we have to...

Repress the excecution of such themes, especially in class.

Take advantage of the occurence and discuss and inquiry about violence, as well as present examples of other professionals or artistas who work with violent themes to express their ideas.

Orient the child that is not appropriate to draw such themes especially in the classroom and because the world is already full of violence and wars.

Understand the reasons that draw a child to express violent themes.

If you have another answer or suggestion, please add your comment in this section.


Português

Enquete:

Quando a criança desenha temas violentos como assassinatos e guerras devemos...

Reprimir a execução de tais desenhos.

Aproveitar a ocorrência de tal tema para discutir, levantar questões e apresentar exemplo de outros profissionais ou artistas que trabalharam com a imagem da violência para exprimir suas idéias.

Orientar a criança que não é conveniente desenhar sobre tais temas especialmente em uma sala de aula.

Compreender porque a criança utiliza o tema da violência em seu desenho.

Caso tenha outra resposta ou sugestão favor acrescentar o comentário nesta seção do blog.

ArtsBridge at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

Brazilian

Culture

Classes

Work developed at Howard Elementary School, Eugene, Oregon, USA, 2009.

All the pictures were taken by Siena. She is a k-2 student and demonstrated a strong ability for photography.

Creative Folding

Arts Bridge Program at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

Creative Folding Activity

Some results at Howard Elementary School, K-2, Eugene, Oregon, USA.

Every week a child is trained by Siena, to take pictures of the class.
All the pictures in this sequence were taken by Amber, a 2nd grade student.

Creative Folding

Creative Folding

We started through a Spanish story that was of easy comprehension. The story had many illustrations and repetitive sequences, as a never ending story type. Although the story didn’t have a direct relation with the activity that was proposed later, it helped to create a captivating environment and stimulate the children’s imagination. However, if I had a nice story related with the activity theme I would have used it, too. After the class, Ms. Calihan recommended a nice book, called: Fold me a poem.

After the story, Ms. Calihan perceived that the kids took a little while trying to create the relation with the story and the creative folding proposed. This happened because they are used to a different methodology that directly connects all the activities and makes the propositions more objective and consequently automatic. The intentional disconnection however, gave them time to think about the activity I was proposing, what explains the time they took to process it.
The objective was to propose them to find out their own starting point. This process is not easy, though. If I had given them a link with the story, they would limit their production to figurative shapes of the animals (characters) of the given story. Letting them choose their own shapes was more challenging and opened to unexpected results of original and/or abstract shapes. Knowing that, on previous classes, they had learnt some origamis, I told them that they would use the thinks they learned but also they should create their own foldings and techniques.
In fact it happened and we had different results. They reproduced some bats and puppies and created compositions with them. Others didn’t remember how to make the origamis then, they transformed the shapes, using things they remembered with inventiveness. I though it might create some conflicts but almost all of them dealt very well and enjoyed the fact that, they could do anything they want to.

Creative process involves the solution of problems. The problems vary from these kind of “creative crises”, to the solution of technical problems. These problems occur very often and they are healthy when worked to be surpassed, as many artists do when working. In this class, the recurrent problem was, how to set the shapes on a way they would be stand still, as the kids intended to do. As shown in the picture, some shapes didn’t have a base to put the glue. So, we oriented the children to make these bases and they did it with care and patience.

As a matter of themes and compositions, many of them, connected with previous works or with the project developed on their classes. They did airplanes taking off or flying, because they’re studying airplanes with Ms. Calihan. They did bats, frogs and puppies and combined them in one composition, because they learned with Ms. Yukiko on previous classes. They invented abstract and figurative forms, putting them together and even creating a story for their 3-D compositions. I couldn’t listen all of the stories but I had time to follow one by one during the process.
As a reference work to this activity, I recommend the works of Richard Serra and Amilcar de Castro.