March 11. Laia: announcement > Conversations across cultures. Social inclusion. Making and learning for media. Cultural diversity. Panel discussion. Hands-on making. Exhibit. How youth see and interpret their world. Adolescent Drawing. Interest with the human figure. We put ourselves into the work. Traditional drawings – models – little experience. Not bad. Not poor. Not talentless. But what kinds of questions are the kids asking? What’s going on here? Diagnosis. Space: skeletal structure. Research project example. 7th graders. No life drawing experience. Given pencils and paper. Asked to draw a person from memory. Then told do a life drawing, to look carefully and think about the lines they were making. Result: very different images. Delicate observational. Flat memory/stereotypes/schemas. Bits of the schema survive into the life drawing, the observational drawing. Memory as cartoonish > schema. Erika > RISD, drawing from upside down photos. Tara’s class > broccoli and red pepper from memory. Judy > figure is not differentiated before ado, not necessary, just part of the background. In Ado there’s an interest in the figure – decontextualized, no background. Developmentally, nothing changes radically, but segues gradually. Style > personalized response, cultural, experiential, vs. schema > the basic ground plan or characteristics [Lowenfeld as geometrical] Their project: kids wanted to make drawings that looked “real” So – what would you do next? • representation of space therefore: no more figure, take another route. > big paper & anything that could make a mark: twigs, feathers, wire. different kinds of lines > experiments with lines. Recognition of differences – lots of different marks. Recognition of dimensionality – near and far, role of empty space. • if you could combine 2 or 3 kinds of marks, what kinds of drawing would you make? Lots of variety and no figures. > next: strips of paper – different than drawn lines. What kind of characteristics? 3rd dimension. > return to 2D – circles, rectangles, triangles – transformed into something similar but the shapes were not pure. What is this tapping into? Schema challenge. More complexity. But the basic notion remains, though it is elaborated. > flat oak tag. How could this material be changed? Goal: engage the kids in different journeys. > wire. How was it different from oak tag? Make space with hands. Take a piece of space out of the air and put it down on the table very gently. Use a piece of wire to explore how inside becomes the outside. Wire describes both inside and outside. > aluminum scraps, sculptures. > return to drawing the figure, while standing [some resistance to standing] > a huge difference in line, pose, and background. What happened? Lines. Shape. Volume. Experiential realism. Body in space. Present in space, present to themselves. Figure drawing as important for ado dev. Self portraits of experience of body in space. New context provided by paper, experiential kinship > push and pull of 2D and 3D materials got translated into the new drawings. Erika > notion of experiment and controlled variables. Judy > perhaps the value as an experiment is not high, but that wasn’t the point. they vaguely thought something might happen but didn’t know what… The kids did not bother with sense of thinking drawings didn’t look right. Drawings off the page. > large butcher block paper. Kids sat on paper and drew their outlines. Stand up to make a picture as if looking down on themselves. > partners lie down on the paper and trace bodies. Overlaps feel transparent. How can we see two things simultaneously? [paint] Then joined together as a big mural, overlapping, space and depth used in different contexts. Use the figure as an element in art, not a solely intact purpose. > clay. Human forms. wrong? What was wrong with the clay? • drawing on clay: making drawings on the clay surface. • the teachers didn’t do an investigation first. [Note: do the investigation yourself first before introducing an activity.] Clay problem > there was no prior play with the material. The models the kids made have nothing to do with clay. Material as originator of the idea, but material was not explored. At this age to question the schematic knowledge > wondering how it follows from the material. What would you ask them to do with clay? What is it like? How would you change it, transform it?