100 Days of Faces Completed

Days 97-99

Day 100

At the beginning of April, 2017 I took on the challenge of drawing/painting/photographing 100 faces in 100 days.  I wanted to learn how to better represent the human face. Mostly I painted and although I have a long way to go, I can see that I took more risks as the project progressed, quieted the critic in my head, posted work I did not like and work I did, and lived within the constraints of time (mostly) and materials.

Below is a brief video that shows the 100 images in the order they were created.

#SOL17: Facing the Face - 100 Day Project

Day 8: 4.11.17 (6B pencil, stabilo pencil, gesso, white marker, digital remix)

Everyone is in the best seat. - John Cage

I am participating in the #100DayProject Creativity and have completed the first week. Each day for no more than 20 minutes I compose a face. I want to study faces and figured that drawing or painting one each day might help me to see differently and to take more chances. Somedays I sketch, mostly I paint, and eventually I imagine that I will collage and photograph. I sometimes alter the images made slightly (or a lot depending on my mood) digitally. 

I have been learning as I compose each day--about drawing and painting faces and more. Felix Scheinger in Urban Watercolor Sketching: A Guide to Drawing, Painting, and Storytelling writes, "All too often we paint things only as we imagine them to be and not as we experience them from observation"(Kindle Locations 829-830). I think about the truth of that statement and how it can also be true in other life situations. Want is a powerful force--as is studying and seeing more objectively.

Some thoughts as I continue in this project:

1. Isolating sections of a face and naming the shape helps me to better draw.
2. Small adjustments to a line or shadow can make large differences.
3. Sometimes my hand just does not want to cooperate.
4. Constraint, such as time, pushes me to finish a work. 
5. Posting a work each day is brave. 
6. A 100 day study feels like an indulgence.
7. I enjoy playing with many styles and have yet to cultivate my own signature. I wonder if I will.
8. I love composing with ink, pencil, paint and words.

I have been posting the image, date, media on a separate page on my blog. The first week of images are below.

Day 1: 4.5.17. (Stabilo pencil, acrylic paint, sharpie paint marker white)

Day 2: 4.6.17 (Stabilo pencil, watercolor, ink, on watercolor paper)

Day 3: 4.7.17 (pencil, watercolor, gesso, digital remix, newspaper)

Day 4: (Acrylic paint, stabilo pencil, white marker) 

Day 5: (4.9.17, stabilo pencil, watercolor on piece
of deli paper - I had wiped paint on it)

Day 6: (4.10.17, gesso, acrylic paint, pencil, stabilo pencil, digital remix)

Day 7: (4.11.17, watercolor, pencil, stabilo pencil, digital remix)

Diligence is Not Enough...Invent Something

Curated list of organizations focusing on creativity in education by Doug Johnson

Staying Creative

Christmas in Harlem (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I found this video referenced on Red Bubble's blog. I  especially like 29.

The image that tops this post is one that I made in December 2011 after spending an afternoon looking at some of Romare Bearden's collages.  I had taken a break from my daily work (Suggestion #7 in video below) and met a friend, Jane, in Harlem.  On my way to the NY public library (Schomburg Center @135th Street) where Bearden's work was being displayed, I captured the image of the the woman in the foreground of the collage I would later make.  Her coat color and jaunty hat caught my eye.

Staying creative is largely a matter of habit, breaking habit, and remaining open to possibility.

Thinking about Spaces of Permission as Curriculum

Milton Glaser says that the "most significant work comes out of misunderstanding."  Is Glaser correct?  If so, how do you grant yourself permission to dwell in problem framing and solving so that your misunderstandings can surface and be explored?  What does it mean to understand a misunderstanding?

If understanding one's misunderstandings are important, then how do you grant permission for learners you teach to do likewise?

What do these spaces of permission look and sound like?  Are spaces of permission a form of curriculum? How might you reconcile, if you can,  spaces of permission as curriculum with the CCSS?  Perhaps considering spaces of permission as descriptive curriculum and CCSS as prescriptive curriculum might be a starting point.

Undo the Folded Lie

Wing Left Behind

"Creativity is the residue of time wasted," wrote Albert Einstein. I think about this observation as I recall the last few months spent visiting city schools where 'wasting time' is an anathema. The efficient education reform machine is juiced on the single test performance of children.  I think of this as I recall my own son's teachers who in the past have who told me in hushed tones that he spends a lot of time looking out the window, daydreaming, as if such behavior was aberrant. Some seemed a bit surprised when I acknowledged what had been said and added, "Yes I know. He's learned that at home."

Nurturing the child's imagination ought to be our concern, our wonder, our delight, our obligation.  It needs to be our national interest and we need to stop pouring tax dollars into testing regimes and the awful prepping that accompanies such national attention. In the classrooms I have been visiting, the imagination is largely undetected.  Truth be told? These visits break my heart.  Recently, I met two young teens who were characterized by their teacher. One was characterized as 'mentally retarded' and the other,  'autistic'.  The teacher agreed that I would have the opportunity to meet the boys and to work with each of them. She expressed concern about the boys' reading given the directive that she had received that limited her choice of texts to 'grade level texts' and ones that exceeded the students' reading ease.  Her school is 'readying' fro the Common Core. We have to use hard books, she says. Her mission is to 'move students from level 1 to to level 2' in state testing.

"I don't know how I am going to move them to level 2," she confided. I know of no other way to characterize many of the teachers I meet other than to say they seem beleaguered, frightened, and terribly uncertain of themselves as teachers--as thinkers.  Student performance on a single state test matters more than anything else. It is no longer hyperbole to say that their very livelihood depends on how their students perform on this single measure.

***************

I had an iPad with me and asked the first boy if he had ever used an iPad.  He said he had not and as we sat next to each other I showed him how it turned on and opened a folder of books.  He indicated that he wanted to see The Three Little Pigs.  I opened it and eased the iPad in front of him.  As we moved through the first screen, he quickly took over figuring how to interact with the text. After a lot of huffing and puffing, I asked if we might stop the book even though we had not reached the end. I asked if he could return to the beginning of the book and perhaps he might show the story to the other boy (who had been sitting near by watching his class give an efferent retelling of a  story).  He agreed and he was quickly joined by the other boy.  What was pretty remarkable was the amount of language the boys generated talking to one and to the book. There were no questions to answer, main ideas to determine, or details to name.  Story existed, at least for the moment, as pleasure.

Their laughter and chatter must have been contagious as it seemed to attract another boy who quickly took my seat and half way through the story the three were joined by another four boys. Within a minute or so, another teacher appeared and herded the boys back to their desks explaining that they needed to write a test-prep essay. One boy squawked and I asked if he might remain until the story was concluded as he had been following along from the beginning. The teacher agreed.

Because these children had not passed the state test during previous administrations, they are subject to two periods of ELA and two periods of mathematics. As a result, they do not have art, music, dance, woodworking, culinary arts, gaming, language, or any type of elective.  They know nothing of hanging out, messing around or geeking out as Mimi Ito describes.  Such worlds are not only banned from school, but are also not valued.  There is the mistaken belief that adding more test prepping time will lead to better test results. In addition to these double periods--social studies and science classes are also offered. At some schools, social studies is simply an excuse to do more "literacy" AKA: test prepping. Once a week the children participate in physical education. In most schools I visit there are no computers, handhelds, or any other type of potential assistive technologies in use or in some cases even present. 

At some schools the teens remain in a single classroom all day. They do not have an occasion to move. One teacher confided how hard this is for some of the learners as they have ADHD. She says how she couldn't do what is required of her students.  Her comment about ADHD had me recalling a comment Jonah Lehrer made recently on a radio show. He was discussing his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, on the Brian Lehrer Show (3.22.12) and it got me wondering:

What if school was based on the continuous reinvention of self, rather than accumulation of information?

Jonah discussed how it was once thought that creativity declined as one aged.  Lehrer says this has been found to be false. It appeared to be so as when one ages some become "weighted down with too much conventional wisdom" (Lehrer, Kindle Locations 1789-1790).  In contrast, creative people consistently reinvent themselves.

Imagine school based on reinvention?  Imagine how differently students and teachers would be understood and situated if the retrieval and remembrance of information ceased to be the main emphasis and instead occasioning the definition and reinvention of one's self were privileged.  Would we need to refer to children as 1s, 2s, partially proficient, ELLs, Speds? Would terms such as 'mentally retarded' still find voice? Would we need to classify children?  Might we redefine malady as sources of creativity?  Lehrer makes this observation:

Or look at a recent study led by Holly White, a psychologist at the University of Memphis. White began by giving a large sample of undergraduates a variety of difficult creative tests. Surprisingly, those students diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) got significantly higher scores. White then measured levels of creative achievement in the real world, asking the students if they’d ever won prizes at juried art shows or been honored at science fairs. In every single domain, from drama to engineering, the students with ADHD had achieved more. Their attention deficit turned out to be a creative blessing (Kindle Locations 602-606).

This capacity to be distracted--a stimulus for creativity--is ruthlessly removed from the day-to-day lives of children and teachers at school. The efficient machine does not recognize distraction as an asset.  This efficiency is a human spirit killer. From the President to the town realtor--from the parent bragging about his/her child's state test score to the CEOs of companies raking in billions on selling tests, scoring services, curricula, test prepping materials, resources, and professional development--we each bear the blame of limiting children and we have the voice to undo it.

Auden, in "September 1, 1939"  said it best, when he wrote:

All I have is a voice 
To undo the folded lie
Of the sensual man-in-the-street 
And the lie of Authority 
Whose buildings grope the sky: 
There is no such thing as the State 
And no one exists alone; 
Hunger allows no choice 
To the citizen or the police; 
We must love one another or die.

How do you unfold the lie?
Where have you started?



Work Cited
Lehrer, Jonah (2012-03-19). Imagine: How Creativity Works. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition. 

The Need to Compose & A Room of One's Own: Art Making & School-Based Writing

Creating Art
Yesterday I knew I needed to create something with my hands, not only my camera.  For awhile when I had a different job and oodles of time, I worked at collage frequently. I enjoyed making batiked papers for my collages, painting with watercolors and acrylics, collecting "found" papers, applying gesso to surfaces, using Liqiuitex or Golden gel mediums, having on hand a range of brushes, artist tape, some sponges, and course a brayer. It's the physicality of the work that interests me as the blank canvas begins to take on shape as I layer paper and paint.

I had been dreaming the last week of a room of my own.  It was a fairly massive space with very large canvases with the edges taped, ones taller than me, and serious rollers with long handles, and pans of paint. I don't have a room of my own.  So yesterday I unpacked art materials I had put away after starting my new job (now 17 months old), carted everything upstairs to the dining room table, covered it with paper and began to work.  A couple hours later, satisfied with the image, I photographed it and then imported it into Photoshop (CS4).  I let it sit on my screen for a few hours taking a look now and again. At about 11:00 p.m. I began to work with the image, layering parts of photographs I had taken the day before and playing. By that time, my home was very quiet and I worked for about an hour, and left the image up on my screen.

This morning, I returned to the image at about 6:00 a.m. and worked at it for awhile, but could not get it to a finished state so I left it alone again and went to work.  I got home at about 9:00 tonight and began thinning the image of the sun by blurring it.  This seemed to settle the work into an evenness that had eluded me. Because I work in layers, I can click off and on sections of the image to see differences, as well as reorder the layers to shift foreground and background.  24 hours later, I felt done and posted the image on RedBubble and Twitter.

School-Based Writing
Tonight I thought about the processes I went through to make the final image and contrasted that with the way "experts" on  several different videos I watched this afternoon teach writing. In preparation for some work I will be doing next week, I was reviewing video all afternoon.  I was dismayed at the amount of talk the guest teachers (expert consultants) did and how the kids regardless of the setting (middle school, high school) sat and watched the guests.  It was like an epic version of Waiting for Godot.

I also was concerned when the guests simply told the kids to write and gave them a few minutes.  Then the students were expected to confer with a partner for a minute or two and then read aloud their work. Throughout this process, each guest consultant kept referring to the students as writers. Most of the  work read by the students in each class was pretty mundane and quite unfinished, and certainly I can understand why, as creating was limited to 6 minutes, some talk, and then Pow: perform.  The expert consultants' comments to the kids were overly rewarding with statements like: "You are fabulous writers." "That's great work." "You're a poet." "You worked really really hard today in your groups."

I just didn't see any of that. And I am a hoping the kids didn't buy it either.  I'm confident the students can do better work, with greater difficulty and complexity than what 6 minutes of pencil to paper produces. So what I was thinking about tonight is the contrast in creating art--be it as a painter, photographer, or writer and the privilege I have to determine the time I need to create a work, the range of tools (physical and technological) I have to use, as well as the certainty that I can abandon or set aside work anytime throughout the process. The students I watched had none of these and I want to remind you that these videos (costly at that) are presented as models for teachers to follow. 

I kept thinking: When do kids learn that creating is tough stuff, not a six-minute task? When do students experience what all artists come up against walls that must be honored and pushed through? What might beginning teachers make of this?

Along Towards Morning (M.A. Reilly, 4.11)