Intervals of three

—Lesson Plan—

How many ways can a picture be broken into thirds?

Three is a magic number in art. Threes cause movement yet feel complete, as in a three-part sonata or three-act play or a three-chord song. Twos can be very stable but may have a movement that feels like bouncing back and forth. Threes have a more complete movement.

For adults, I get into geometry and more complex pictures. For the kids, all I have to do is ask them to look for threes and triangles. The fun starts when we examine additional paintings that are not part of my lecture.

In this painting by John William Waterhouse, the single figure takes a triangular pose. Waterhouse gives us a second triad in the post with a pyramid top and a third triad in the three candles. The woman feels static, but the artist did not center her. He creates angles that feel triangular in breaks in the trees and the direction of the stairs. Keep looking and you will find more. The painting is three units tall and four units wide--a ratio that includes the number three and is a perfect fourth in Western music.

A trapezoid is a square and a square is a trapezoid

—Lesson plan—

I have a nifty trick for helping students see objects in foreshortened perspective.

I draw a square, with blue Sharpie, in the middle of a piece of acrylic. By the way, I have a stack of acrylic rectangles with rounded edges, maybe 12" x 20" or so, that I use for palettes and monoprinting plates. We use them for the ink transfer lessons, too. Anyway, I draw a square on one with blue Sharpie. Then on another, I draw a sideways trapezoid of the same height as the square with a red Sharpie.

One-by-one, I have the students place the two plates on edge on the table in front of them, with the trapezoid perpendicular to their eyes, and the square behind and turned away at an angle, as though the two were covers of an open book.

They can all get to a position (one-at-a-time) where the two shapes become exactly superimposed and turn into one trapezoid.

Once they have seen this, then I can hold up objects in perspective and they get it.

Like most of my lesson plans, this works for kids and adults, but works best for children around nine years or older. I'll introduce perspective to them younger; it's okay if they don't get it right way. This is a great way to introduce the "Coins in space/falling checkers" lesson plan.

Black is white, and white is black

—Lesson Plan—

It is important to really see and understand what is happening with light in order to make realistic pictures.

I used to teach in a basement and we had little windows above our tables. I would take a white and a black piece of construction paper and hold them up to the window side-by-side. When I turned the black so the sun fell directly upon it and I turned the white so that the sun was behind it, the black would become lighter than the white.

This is a great demonstration that teaches the students to match the color and value to what they see, not what they remember or think.

Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors. —John Ruskin

Tricking the camera

—Lesson Plan—

This is a lesson I use with my photography students. But it is also useful for helping students understand values.

I tell my students that we are going to trick our cameras. We set up a still life with several black objects, several white objects, and several middle grey objects. Here, I have a mug, a spoon, and a piece of fabric in each value.

We set our cameras on auto and shoot all the objects together with the flash turned on and also turned off. Then, we use the manual mode and let the camera meter tell us the exposure to use, without a flash. A tripod may help. In this picture, we have all the objects assembled together and photographed without a flash at the camera's recommended exposure. Everything looks good.

Sticks and stones make green

—Lesson Plan—

I used to teach art to children as young as one. How do I teach art to a one-year-old? Actually, I do it the same way I teach any age. Very often my lesson plans position students—whether one year old or one-hundred-and-one—to make discoveries.This lesson plan is one of those.

I worked with a young art teacher who complained that our hip bosses at the creative preschool gave the kids too much freedom and not enough guidance. "There are rules in art," she said. And that's true. Experiential education still requires teaching. My young colleague wanted to teach the students how to mix secondary colors. Red and blue make violet—that sort of thing.

I said, "watch this lesson." I went outside and gathered driveway gravel, from minute pieces of crushed limestone to small pebbles. I then found a bunch of dead sticks of wood, smaller and larger, but all the right size for a child's hand. I filled empty coffee cans with red, blue, or yellow tempera and mixed in the gravel. I gave each of the children paper and set the tools out for them to create with.

What Do I Know?

Sometimes, my graduate studies in art remind me of a lesson I learned when I was five or six.

I was hanging out with a kid who lived around the corner and a few houses up. I think, maybe, his family had just moved there. I don't remember hanging out with him ever again but on this day we walked along the ditch in the park near our houses. The water was low and pooled in long puddles. All along the way, there were little oil slicks on the surface of the standing water. The rainbow blobs suggested pictures to my neighbor, and as we walked along, he told me that each one was a word and he asked me what word I thought each signified. I would guess, and he would correct me and say that it was something else. I could see the logic as he shared his meanings, though I could never guess the words he had in mind. This interchange went on all through the park. We got to a part further into the park where the water seemed to dry up and there was a last little oil slick that looked like an explosion. I said, "this one means 'boom!'" He considered my interpretation and said, "yeah, that one means 'boom!'"

When you are on your way, you are already succeeding

—Maxim—

When you are on your way, you are already succeeding.

Our infatuation with instant gratification confuses us about success. We want things to happen instantly, and we live in a world where some things happen instantly. But sometimes it seems to take forever for meaningful things to happen. It takes time to make art and it takes time to make an art career. That has always been the case. But it may take more time these days just to get started. And that makes me feel, bitterly and sadly, like I'm not succeeding. The hardest thing about making art, I think, is getting to make it. I feel like I've spent twenty-five years trying to make ends meet so I can afford to make art at all. It sometimes feels like an endless quest to get to point zero.

But I recently learned something about the word success that I think may help to change the way I think about my objectives and the time frame. The word success originally meant to come after (or before, or under, or over, or near to) something else. As the word was used over time, success began to mean reaching a goal that had been set.