Week 1: Art

What is: visual arts?

This is the question we were encouraged to dwell upon in our introductory lecture for EDMT5530: Creative Arts K-6.

As soon as the question was asked, my mind began to be filled with images of famous works, such as Whistler’s Mother, Mona Lisa, The Scream, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, just to name a few. I then began thinking about other art forms… ceramics, drawings, crafts, photography, sculptures … and Michelangelo’s masterpiece from the Renaissance period of David popped into my mind. From there, I thought about Sculpture by the Sea, the world’s largest annual outdoor sculpture exhibition at Bondi. My mind then wandered to modern art, and I thought about how it is often quite eccentric, and reflects a spirit of experimentation. Finally, I was brought back to memories of doing art at school. What great memories they were!

Whilst I had been exploring those thoughts, our UOS coordinator and lecturer, Robyn Gibson, had instructed us to ‘creatively’ answer with the person sitting next to us her initial question: What is: visual arts?. When she said ‘creatively’ answer, Robyn meant that we could respond to the question by drawing, writing a poem, mind-mapping, doing a short play/representation – we could express ourselves in whatever way we wished!

The first thing that popped into mind was to do a drawing of a big tree; a thick trunk, lots of branches, leaves, and vines hanging off, long, strong-looking roots… But I decided to ask the person sitting next to me what she thought we could do as an idea. And I couldn't believe it – she suggested to also draw a image of a tree! And so we did.

In our first art tutorial, Robyn played a game with us. It involved dividing up into teams, and we were each given a sheet of paper with a letter of the alphabet written in the corner. We were instructed to draw a picture (which began with that allocated letter) of a particular characteristic that answered the question: What makes a good art teacher.  The actual game involved guessing correctly the characteristic the other teams had drawn. In my opinion, it was such a great game - not only brainstorm what we believe are key characteristics to being a good art teacher, but also encouraged team participation and cooperation! Definitely a game I will use in the classroom when I become a teacher!

Below is an image of the pictures/art teacher characteristics our class drew.

Although we are only at the end of week one, I can already see how valuable and great this unit of study is going to be. In fact, to say that I am simply just excited for the upcoming 7 weeks of lectures and tutorials would be an understatement – I don't think I have ever been so excited about a subject that I passionately believe in!