Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Explorations in mark making

Student double handed experimentations while listening to music, the chieftains (Irish)







3 comments:

choral_composer said...

Some great pics...is this a class you are teaching?

kathkell said...

Yup. These are my awesome students at at Sam Houston State Uniersity.

kathkell said...

Art and life mimic. Students make assumptions about how to put even a simple mark or line on a page--based on there assumptions they use the same tool, hold it the same way, and get the same thing each time. Currently we are trying to move beyond assumptions about what is a mark making tool, how we hold it, the movement of our bodies, even which hand we use, or maybe not using hands at all. New marks are made. Now the real task is how to apply these new discovers to other tasks.

It is like life. It is so very difficult to change our patterns, habits, assumptions, even they no longer work. And it is harder still when we learn a new way not to slide back into doing it in the same nonproductive way. We need to give permission to those we trust, to interrupt us when we slide back into unhealthy patterns. We need to give them permission to try it a diiferent way.

The practices of art parallel the practices of life.