Art at RMS

Remember this guy from Star Wars? In 10 year old “E’s” version, the legs are jointed for movement and the laser blasters on the head swivel to aim in all directions. There is a flap in the back of the ‘body’ to load warriors.
When this student started at RMS, two years ago, he puzzled over trying to get two pieces of paper to stand up for‘walls’. I told him recently that I am very proud of all he has learned to now be able to manipulate materials so skillfully.

I have a small but abundantly enthusiastic group of “Action Painters”. They started inside by the sink, painting with their feet. They soon moved on to splatter and drip painting, then on to large format murals with giant brushes and alternative tools. Sometimes they fell in. Sometimes innocent bystanders got dribbled on. They persevered.
We moved outside and threw water balloons filled with paint at large sheets of butcher paper, and tried mops and rollers.
The latest request was to try spray paint.
It was a covert mission, carried out during lunch recess.
(We are having a total blast.)
[Above, 9 year old 'D' adds a border to his painting on cardboard.]

Two like minded sculptors used ‘art straws’ and masking tape to construct these aliens. The one on the right has since sprouted very impressive wings and has moved on, away from this futuristic interior. Designed by “C” and “N”, Age 9

Masks of all kinds have been popular this Spring. This clay mask was crafted by 6 year old “C”.

8 year old “M” taught himself to use “Paint” on the classroom computer earlier this year. Since then, it has been his medium of choice. He has collected, titled and stored a dozen or more images. Sometimes he works in series. Sometimes he adds words and artist’s statements right on the image. He likes to print them out, but sometimes they arrive in two pieces, and we have to crop and glue them together. We are on our second ink cartridge…
Last week I suggested that he might want to make a power point slide show of his work, and quickly showed him how to add a new slide and import an image. By the end of class, he had his slide show, and triumphantly displayed it for his classmates, using a video projector hooked up to my laptop.

First they painted with their feet, then they "invented" splatter painting. These 9 and 10 year old students were delighted to discover after this session that there was once an artist who liked to paint the way they do.http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/pollock/lavender-mist/

An Abstract Expressionist style of painting, widespread in the 1950s and 1960s, where paint is dripped, dropped, smeared, spattered, or thrown on the canvas. The term was first used about Jackson Pollock's work.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_painting

These paintings are part of a series by 9 year old "K". She decided to limit her choice of colors on each painting.

These older students discovered the paint and large tools left over from a younger class's action painting session and explored painting in a new way. "Everything old is new again."