How-To – Page 3 – A Closer Look

First Drawing: planning, designing, reflecting

The circle undrawn is never the circle drawn; — Norman Nicholson

The 20^th Century British poet knew of the gap between our eye, our mind, and our hands. This gap, quite apparent at the beginning of the school year awaits our response. Integrating a visual strategy into your class can begin anywhere. The point is to start looking and start connecting looking to seeing, seeing to drawing, drawing to words.

For the past two years I have started with Albrecht Dürer’s Melencholia I (Albrecht Dürer – Melancholia I, 1514). I don’t spend a lot of time discussing the work of art as a cultural object; rather, we use the work of art as a beginning of seeing and thinking. I have chosen the print for a variety of reasons. First, it is a significant work of art that continues to inspire conversation. Many have tried their hand at its composition. The image also covers a range of objects and ideas: students can draw the entire piece or focus on one particular element.

“All her life Mary has been strong, confident and smart. Her parents were always wealthy, and had everything she had ever asked for. She had long beautiful silky dresses, and enough gold for the entire kingdom. Yet, she still felt as if something was missing – not something from her extravagant room, but something missing insider her…”

The image can handle sustained observation and the longer you look, the more you see.

“The Story: The woman, her child, and her crew were trying to get to their destination or the light in the distance. Their ship was wrecked and they were the only ones to survive. They washed up on a deserted island and the wreckage came with them. Now they are stuck on the gross uninhabited island and can see their destination in the distance. She is upset and starving. She is afraid she will die before someone finds them.”

The drawing work leads to conversation: What did you see? What did you draw? Why are these objects together? What does melencolia mean? I then can ask the question (and one we will be asking and discussing all year): In what ways is seeing literal? In what ways is seeing metaphorical?

“Two angels were sent to a small island. On the small island there were about 20 people on two boats which have crashed on the shore due to a bad storm. The boats no longer worked. Everyone was hot, thirsty, and hungry. They were so desperate for help…”

Of course, I don’t answer any of these questions, only start the story listening to the new worlds being made. The students are encouraged to speak, to say, and begin ‘showing’ what they see. And this starts our journey for the year. And our conversation…

–James Shivers

How-To: Use the Online Collection

The Yale Center for British Art’s vast online collection is a great resource to use in the classroom. Here are step-by-step instructions with images to walk you through a topical search of the online collection.

Step 1: Go to the Yale Center for British Art website. You can click here, or type in http://britishart.yale.edu/ into your web browser.

Step 2: Under “Collections,” select “Search.” You can also click on “Highlights,” “Using the Collection,” and “Related Resources” to find other materials and information that can help you in the classroom.

Step 3: After clicking on “Search,” the “Search All Collections” webpage will come up. You might use this search if you are looking for a specific painting or various works by one artist. Searching all collections will give you artwork and literature across all mediums. To narrow your search, look to the right hand column and decide what you are looking for.

Step 4: For this example, we will search the “Paintings and Sculptures.” Selecting this will send us to the “Paintings and Sculptures,” search page. As you can see, selecting a medium will allow for even more options to narrow your search and find exactly what you are looking for.

Step 5: Search for the paintings and sculptures that you want to see. By clicking on the “Classification” or “Genre” options, a dropbox menu will appear with various options that have already by pre-selected. These can be helpful in coming up with ideas, or you can choose to type in your own original search. For this example, we will look for Animals in Art. We can see that there is an option for “animal art” in the “Genre” menu.

Step 6: After selecting “animal art” and clicking on Find, we are sent to a page with all of the paintings and sculptures that are categorized under the “animal art” genre. Remember, you can narrow down your search even further by providing more information in the search page. You can also narrow down your search using the various options on the right side of the Search Results page.

Step 7: Select an image from the Search Results page to learn more about the artwork. Many of the pieces that are part of the Permanent Collection here at the British Art Center have images that can be downloaded and used for your use in the classroom. Simply click on the “Download” option underneath the image, and select how you would like to download the image. Images that the British Art Center does not have rights to will not be available to download.

The online collection is a valuable resource that the Yale Center for British Art provides and understanding how to search the collection is necessary in utilizing this resource. Please feel free to comment with any questions about the online collection and how to use it.

Seeing Perspective

Here’s a classroom activity using Reg Bulter’s Man (early 1960s) from the online collection.

Lesson: Explore the value of location, view-point, and narration.

Activity: class drawing, reading, and writing

Process: Use all three images from the online collection

Draw image (10 min) whole or detail. Respond in writing to the following questions (5 min). What is the mood? What is the story?

B1993.37.3

Draw second image (10 min) whole or detail. Respond in writing to the following questions (5 min): What is the mood from this perspective? What is the story?

Draw third image (10 min) whole or detail. Respond in writing to the following questions (5 min): What is the mood from this perspective? What is the story?

Reflection and follow up: If you had only seen one of these images what would you know in terms of mood and story?

In what ways might we use our classwork today towards understanding the effect of location, view-point, and mood when we read literature? When viewing works online? When reading a news story?

Example: Although I generated the lesson for the students and their needs, I too benefit from ‘seeing perspective’ and participating with them. Here’s a clip from my journal covering two of the steps.

seeing perspective example1

Place in the Classroom

The activity generated quite a bit of conversation in the classroom the following day. Students gained perspective on a range of skills and frameworks — from seeing perspective to the role of location in story telling.

–James Shivers

DRAWING A PASSAGE

2-drawing-passage-240x300 — What if? The Odyssey, Bk 5

Poetry is one of our oldest image-makers. Words paint. Readers imagine the world of the text. What if we tapped into this visual process and redirected the output? What if we began asking readers to ‘give us a picture’ of what they ‘see’ as they read?

What do these words see? And later, how might words show a place or an emotion?

Crazy how the gods are getting blamed for all this

Poetry attempts to alter our perception through words. By asking students to draw what they see in a passage or a chapter we bring them into the poetic process. Creating a classroom where these drawings are shared and discussed situates each member of the class as an image-maker. By establishing various drawing activities within the study of the language arts we encourage students to explore other versions of ‘image-making’. The imagination has another platform. Students have access and place to continue the conversation.

In class students discussed their planning (“pre-writing”) for their design as well as their hopes (the effect on the audience). Everyone had words to add. Later in writing they pursued this question: In what ways did the activity alter or enhance your understanding of the passage or reading itself? You may discuss your own work or work of your peers.

6-drawing-passages-232x300 — Which strengths?

For the assignment the students chose a passage from their reading to draw and provide ‘a visual reading of the passage’. The examples below are from three different sections of the text we were reading at the time (The Odyssey). One student wrote later that the assignment was the most difficult of the unit “because we had to draw a picture of what was going on in the chapter and I didn’t really have a good understanding of the chapter that we had to draw which made it tough.”

–James Shivers

Why Making Pictures Should Be Part of the Writing Process

When a teacher makes the decision to bring art materials into the classroom and actually devote precious writing time to making art, that teacher is showing two things: 1. courage, and 2. a clear understanding of what makes a good writer. Susan Sontag said, “A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.” We ask children to use “visual imagery” in their writing on a daily basis. We tell them to “paint a picture with words.” The one thing we often forget, however, is how abstract words are for children, and how little experience they actually have with writing them down.

Words are a second language to all of us, if you consider the pictures in our minds to be our first language. When I ask you to remember your favorite childhood toys, do you picture the words “slinky” and “Legos?” More likely, you picture a silver coil climbing down the steps, and multi-colored blocks snapping together. As adults, we barely notice the steps we take to describe the pictures in our heads with words. But for children, the task of translating what they are thinking about into words is a challenge. Add to that the added task of forming the letters and sounding out the spelling, and you are asking for a lot of invisible steps to be taken.

Allowing time for making pictures in the writing classroom gives students – and teachers – the opportunity to see what they want to write. This provides opportunities for building vocabulary (“What do you call that color?” “What time of day is this taking place?” “Will you write about that moon?”). It also invests the students in their work, so that they desire success. It’s not always easy to get a student to describe what she wants to write, but ask her to describe her drawing and it is a different story. The time a teacher invests in allowing students to draw (before – not after – writing with words) is more than made up for when the students’ words flow more easily and confidently. Drawing loosens up the inhibitions, opens the lines of communication, and gives the student a voice.

“In my picture I see a yellow spider resting on a cool leaf. The leaf touches the moonlight and the stars. The wind dancing with the sky suddenly dies down into a cool winter breeze. Good night sleeping yellow spider.”

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