VISUAL ART thoughts #1: What is Art?

In our first Visual Arts lecture, Robyn Gibson asked us:

What is Art?

We could respond in any way we wished: a poem, a song, a picture. My group came up with this haiku poem:

Quite a philosophical approach ...

As an initial stimulus into thinking about Art, it worked wonders. I have long wondered about the value of fine arts. Through Robyn's questioning, I began to really reflect on the place of visual arts in our world. I imagined a world without art, and realised that no other discipline does what art does. To my mind, art is a way of capturing and expressing something of our human souls, something we could not express in any other way.

'If I Sold My Soul' by Scott Belcastro:
You can see how forlorn the soul is, how tiny in the grand scheme of things, and its' dark vulnerability.

When I fully conceptualised a world without art, I suddenly realised the vital importance it has to our world. This realisation has made me determined to integrate it as much as possible into the classroom.

Workshop Ideas:
Drawing the Alphabet &
Name Montage

Our first workshop:

Activity

1. Group the students, roughly 5 students in each
2. Give each group a range of letters. My group had from T - Z
3. Group come up with words which they then represent symbolically by putting pencil to paper
4. Play a game, where from A-Z, teacher puts the drawings on the board and the other groups must guess what the word is and are awarded points for each correct guess.

Example of the activity:
When given the letter W, students get to come up with a word as a group, and how they might tackle drawing it. Then each individual draws their word. Another common method is to break the word down into syllables and draw each syllable.

This activity is great and I will definitely use it in the classroom. Not only is it really fun, it promotes collaboration between groups and has strong links to literacy and the arts. You could also adapt it a number of ways depending on your class e.g. make it so that students have to choose words that have at least 2 syllables.

Our homework was to then create a name montage using 3D materials to represent our interests, personalities, what we love/hate. This would be a fantastic activity to do in the classroom in the first few weeks of term to get to know the students in a creative way. My only concern is level of parental support and resources in creating a large disparity between the quality of the montages. It would potentially be better to do the activity in the classroom to balance out those external factors. 

Name Montage from Workshop 1:
I used shells to symbolise my love for the beach, a flower as love for beauty and nature, musical notes to show that I am musical, peppercorns because I like to cook and some small versions of photographs I've taken to the far left.