I'm currently getting ready to move to a new apartment and am also getting ready to move into a brand new art room...yay! With all this moving on the horizon, I've been sorting and packing at home and at school. On my last day of cleaning at school, I found a stack of unclaimed, no-name drawings. They were some sketches we had done in preparation for a bigger project about landscape painting. Instead of throwing them into the recycling bin, I decided to cut them up and start stocking the collage station for next year. After running them through the paper cutter quickly, I noticed when I got to the last corner of the stack of papers, there were about four beaming yellow suns in a nice, neat stack.It may be hard to imagine, but this little discovery made me realize something that I particularly love about teaching art and about art in general. The human brain responds to the challenge of creating pictures and making marks in very similar ways. I would go so far as to say that they are almost universally human. There are books upon books written about this very notion. Human mark-making can be traced from the 23 kindergarteners in my art room in 2012 all the way back to the primitive folks who created those early paintings in the caves of Les Caux.
In this ordinary moment, seeing those suns all stacked up, illustrated one simple truth--in today's world of huge diversity from student to student, where differentiation is the number one key to success, it is still a pretty safe bet that 8 out of 10 students between the ages of 5 and 8, when asked to draw a landscape, will draw grass, maybe some trees, blue sky, and most likely a bright shiny sun tucked just-so in the corner of the paper because it simply doesn't feel right to put it anywhere else. Maybe I'm mistaken, but it's not my place to teach this out of them...the sun will migrate from the corner of the paper in due time.
For now, It's comfortable in the corner, and...
If you're lucky it will have sun glasses and a smile.
Needless to say, I decided to memorialize this discovery and plan to hang these in my art rooms in the fall.
