An Art Exploration

If you're not planning on sending the kids home with something cute that they made themselves and you aren't working down a list of specific things that a legislative committee somewhere has decided that children this age ought to know, then this might be an art project for you too!

The first thing, of course, is to stop calling it an art project, I think, because words matter and the word "project" connotes ideas that get people focused on results or destinations. I suggested to the adults responsible for managing the art station to think of it as an art exploration.

It starts with these 2'x2' lucite squares: smooth, flat, non-porous surfaces. Paint just slides across them, never diminishing, flowing. You can use tools to swoop and swoosh it. If you use your hands, they glide through and across the paint.

And then there are these egg carton parts: rough, pointy, absorbent surfaces. When you apply paint to these it gets sucked right up, some of it always staying behind when you try to move it, leaving a permanent trace of pigment wherever it's been. It's more challenging to get paint in every nook and cranny so you have to adjust your brush to different angles and use different techniques like dabbing or twisting or wiggling.

Finally we explored using lots of tools, including brushes.

And like with any good exploration, we made some discoveries along the way about color . . .

. . . about texture . . .

. . . about print-making . . .

. . . about cleaning up and starting over . . .

. . . about exploring alone . . .

. . . and exploring together.

We took it where it needed to go, this exploration of smooth and rough, non-porous and absorbent, flat and pointy.

It was messy, sure, but it didn't have to be. That was up to how you wanted to explore.

And if you did, along the way, produce a masterpiece . . .

. . . and some of us did . . .

. . . then you can save it as a print.

There's no test that will ever tell us what the children learned from their exploration, and I know that for some that makes it suspect.

It's just play after all: how does anyone know what they know about paint and process and smooth and pointy? How can anyone express that to others other than to show them? I suspect, in fact, that these testers, these "accountability" thugs, aren't interested at all in learning, just in measuring. And this is all too hard to measure -- impossible to measure. So, they stick to math and reading comprehension, judging the whole of education by the narrow calculation of what can be calculated, casting the rest aside as mere play, a remainder that for the rest of us is everything.

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