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| "Glorious Days End" 20 x 30 |
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Sometime you just have to paint it.....
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Arts Education Matters: We know , We Measured it.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/12/03/13greene.h34.html
This is well worth the cup of coffee and a read.
This is well worth the cup of coffee and a read.
COMMENTARY
Arts Education Matters: We Know, We Measured It
—Cari Vander Yacht for Education Week
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Though the arts receive relatively little attention from policymakers and school leaders, exposing young people to art and culture can have a big impact on their development. The problem is that almost no one is bothering to study and document the extent to which the arts and culture can affect students. Instead, policymakers, researchers, and schools are typically focused on what is regularly and easily measured: math and reading achievement. This leads defenders of the arts to attempt to connect the arts to improved math and reading scores—a claim for which there is almost no rigorous evidence. Other arts advocates believe that the benefits cannot and need not be measured.
But the important effects of art and cultural experiences on students can be rigorously measured. In fact, we recently conducted two studies that used random-assignment research designs to identify causal effects of exposure to the arts through museum and theater attendance. In the museum study, we held a lottery with nearly 11,000 students from 123 Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma schools, roughly half of whom were assigned to visit Crystal Bridges of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., while the other half served as the control group. In the live-theater study, we conducted a lottery to offer free tickets to roughly half of the 700 Arkansas students applying to see "Hamlet" or "A Christmas Carol" at a professional theater in Fayetteville.
Education Week Commentary asked leading educators and advocates to discuss the arts in K-12 education. Some of the contributors assert that the arts are a bridge between traditional academic subjects and the creative skills necessary to thrive in a global, 21st-century economy. Others argue for the critical part the arts play in child development.
Regular contributing artists illustrate the package, which continues online with a videothat explores the role of the arts in classroom engagement.
This special section is supported by a grant fromThe Wallace Foundation. Education Weekretained sole editorial control over the content of this package; the opinions expressed are the authors' own, however.
By comparing outcomes for students who had these art experiences—by chance—with the outcomes of those who did not, we can identify with confidence what the arts do for young people. The approach we took, which is typical in medical research, creates treatment and control groups that are, on average, identical in their backgrounds and prior interests, with only chance determining the distinction between the two groups. Therefore, any subsequent differences we observed in the students were caused by touring an art museum or seeing live theater, not a result of pre-existing differences among them.
We were also careful to focus on outcomes that could plausibly be altered by the arts. We didn't look at math- and reading-test scores because we have no reason to expect that arts experiences would have an impact on them. Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner, who are affiliated with the education research group Project Zero at Harvard University, have conducted systematic reviews of the research literature and found little credible evidence that the benefits of the arts transfer to other academic subjects. We should no more expect the arts to boost math scores than expect math to enhance appreciation for the arts.
Instead, we looked at whether exposure to the arts affected students' knowledge of the arts and altered their desire to consume the arts in the future. We also looked at whether art experiences had an effect on student values, such as tolerance and empathy. Finally, we looked at whether students' ability to engage in critical thinking about the arts was affected by these experiences.
The results across our two experiments were remarkably consistent: These cultural experiences improve students' knowledge about the arts, as well as their desire to become cultural consumers in the future. Exposure to the arts also affects the values of young people, making them more tolerant and empathetic. We suspect that their awareness of different people, places, and ideas through the arts helps them appreciate and accept the differences they find in the broader world. Arts experiences boostcritical thinking, teaching students to take the time to be more careful and thorough in how they observe the world. Noticing details in paintings during a school tour, for example, helps train students to consider details in the future.
"Arts experiences boost critical thinking, teaching students to take the time to be more careful and thorough in how they observe the world."
These improved outcomes may not boost scores on math and reading tests, but most parents, communities, and educators care about them. We don't just want our students to learn vocationally useful skills in math and reading. We also want them to be knowledgeable and frequent patrons of the arts. We want them to be tolerant and empathetic human beings. And we want them to be astute observers of their surroundings. Some of these qualities may help students earn a living, but their importance has more to do with students' development into cultured and humane people.
Our experiments suggest that rigorous study can document the additional effects of the arts on students, including the educational benefits of poetry, literature, music, film, and dance. Future studies could also consider other possible outcomes. Perhaps the arts encourage students to be more engaged in school, improve graduation rates, and increase college attendance, all of which tend to contribute to happiness and productivity.
None of this research will occur, however, until defenders of the arts recognize the need for it. Arts advocates can no longer rely on weak studies that simply compare students who participate in the arts with those who don't. Such studies are pervasive, and the claims they make are likely overblown. Skeptics can correctly wonder whether the research truly demonstrates that the arts make people awesome, or if awesome people are simply attracted to the arts. To convince skeptics of how the arts can influence a student's trajectory, future studies will have to adopt rigorous research designs that can isolate causal effects.
MORE OPINION
Art collectors are bidding up prices, and enormous fortunes are devoted to acquiring and displaying art. It makes little sense for arts patrons to spend a fortune acquiring and commissioning masterpieces, while failing to demonstrate the benefits of the arts with quality research. To determine whether there are important social benefits derived from arts activities, money should be invested in funding rigorous research, which can be expensive.
If the arts and culture are to remain a vibrant part of children's education, arts patrons will need to step forward to help pay for the kind of quality research that shows not only what those benefits are, but just how significant they can be.
Vol. 34, Issue 13, Page 24
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Thursday, December 4, 2014
WHAT IS ART FOR.
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2014/sep/10/what-is-art-for-alain-de-botton-guide-video?CMP=share_btn_tw
This is such a good listen. I would encourage all that have 3 minutes to listen to this. Its why we artist do what we do.
This is such a good listen. I would encourage all that have 3 minutes to listen to this. Its why we artist do what we do.
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| AT PEACE 24 X 30 This is a new piece I currently have available. I hope you all had a safe, turkey coma holiday. |
Thursday, November 13, 2014
For the love of Morandi
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| "All that's left" 14 x 10 I am very much in love with Morandi's work. The sutle use of color and lack of color on the simplest forms. So this is my tribute to him without doing the same work. |
Monday, November 3, 2014
Painting titles
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| Just One More Kiss 36 x 24 Most times a title to a painting just comes to me while I'm painting or from the very start, but the ones that don't I go back to song titles. I think for florals they say so much so that the right title has to tell the story. Flowers are for weddings, funerals, love, forgiveness and just a note to say I am thinking about you. I paint them for this very reason. What could be better than walking into a room and seeing these lovely temporal objects to bring to mind what they are for. Now if I could only put smell-a-vision on my blog I would have it made. |
Saturday, November 1, 2014
conversations with Picasso
This is a recent post from Brain Pickings. Org
Picasso on Intuition, How Creativity Works, and Where Ideas Come From
by Maria Popova
“To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.”
“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work,” painter Chuck Closememorably scoffed. “Show up, show up, show up,” novelist Isabelle Allende echoed in heradvice to aspiring writers, “and after a while the muse shows up, too.” Legendary composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky put it similarly in an 1878 letter to his benefactress: “A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood.” Indeed, this notion that creativity and fruitful ideas come not from the passive resignation to a muse but from the active application of work ethic — ordiscipline, something the late and great Massimo Vignelli advocated for as the engine of creative work — is something legions of creative luminaries have articulated over the ages, alongside the parallel inquiry of where ideas come from. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most succinct and elegant articulation comes from one of the greatest artists of all time.
Picasso having lunch at the Brasserie Lipp, chatting with Pierre Matisse, Henri Matisse's son. Photograph by Brassaï.
This was one of the questions the famed Hungarian photographer Brassaï posed to Pablo Picasso over the course of their 30-year-long interview series, collected in Conversations with Picasso (public library) — the same superb 1964 volume that gave us Picasso on success and why you should never compromise creatively. When Brassaï asks whether the painter’s ideas come to him “by chance or by design,” Picasso slips in some sidewise wisdom on the tyranny of “creative block” and responds:
I don’t have a clue. Ideas are simply starting points. I can rarely set them down as they come to my mind. As soon as I start to work, others well up in my pen. To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing… When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.
To further illustrate this notion that the best creative work happens when the rational, self-editing mind gets out of the way of the intuitive inclination — something Ray Bradbury articulated beautifully in a 1974 interview — Picasso offers an illustrative example. Despite being both a professional admirer and a personal friend of Matisse’s, he cites the painter’s notoriously methodical creative process as a betrayal of this notion that an artist should honor his or her initial creative intuition:
Matisse does a drawing, then he recopies it. He recopies it five times, ten times, each time with cleaner lines. He is persuaded that the last one, the most spare, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and yet, usually it’s the first. When it comes to drawing, nothing is better than the first sketch.
Making Picasso's point visible: In 2010, MoMA curators used X-ray technology to reveal the many iterations behind Henri Matisse's painting 'Bathers by a River,' on which the painter worked for eight years between 1909 and 1917.
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