the process

“The materials with which artists work, the moment-by-moment decisions thy make in shaping those materials, or in following newly apparent accidents of shape or form or feeling, influence the oncoming decisions in ways that do not pre-exist that particular temporal phase in the work. Maker and material … flow and change dialogically until that mysterious moment arrives when, ‘the work’ is ‘finished’.

Ciaran Benson, The Cultural Psychology of Self, Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds.  2001, Routledge

Art making: some insights into what it's about.
It helps to think of the creative process as a multi-layered experience incorporating the physical (sensory), intellectual (higher-order thinking), emotional (expressive affective qualities), (and sometimes, something else, something much more). Like alchemy, the Art is more than the sum of its parts.

The maker enters, using the experiences and tools provided by the sensory world to negotiate the first layer.  Here, she learns the language of images; the weight of colours, the depth of a texture, the feel of light.  These provide signs directing her to the means for exploring the articulate, silent world of the image and ... the inner landscape.

Below this layer, are things equated with the subconscious, the things that drive us, attract, fascinate and beguile.  The artmaker is drawn by the need to express, reflect and conceptualise - to make real the intangible inner world - to communicate singular perceptions of reality.  This is where the layers coalesce into an artwork, a tangible, meaning-rich object able to communicate whole worlds of knowing in an instant – intended to be received and eaten whole.

The result is not a solitary product but a sign on the journey. Over a career, a body of work becomes a map of the journey; decipherable and potentially immersive.

The initial engagement is the invitation to explore the process.  Optimistically, it becomes a life long process, and, like life lived – the products are tangible evidence of the process and the whole is viewable only at the end. 
I wish this level engagement for each of our students. I hope that they take up the invitation to embark and journey - guided and directed in the early years, evermore self directed in the senior years.

Self knowledge, awareness of the subtle world and a sense of place in it is the potential reward for accepting.

This is the journey of the artist.

Alana Hampton
Head of Faculty, Visual Arts
ahampton@sthildas.qld.edu.au

What the Visual Arts Offer

The Visual Arts offer students opportunities for rich and deep experiences within a progressive, scaffolded curriculum framework, the making of art becomes the embodiment of the search for a deeper understanding of Self – a process, that in the first instance engages the physical, but carries a great deal more in its potential.  In the end, artmaking provides access to myriad levels of realisation if you chose to engage fully with the opportunities.

Art, like science and play, engages the whole being and through connection, leads to a rich and creative sense of Self within Place.

V S. Ramachandran MD, PhD, who, in the 2003 BBC Reith Lectures, explored the ‘Science of Art’ is involved in ongoing studies in neurology to explore how the brain creates and responds to art.  His findings suggest what art educators already know – Visual Art; artmaking and art gazing, is a timeless, whole Being experience that allows full concepts to be grasped in an instant.

Visual and Media Literacies are essential building blocks in education and citizenry for the 21st Century

“….personal development is based on what happens to us in the two worlds in which we live.  One is the external physical world of things and events; the other is the inner world of senses, feelings and meanings.  Art activities are important because they form a bridge of communication and interaction between these two worlds.  (Czurles 1977, p.5). 

Creating is the most sophisticated expression of cognitive, aesthetic and experiential skills. The Visual Art subject encourages and teaches the creative process and invites the development of an authentic personal aesthetic. In our world of increasing visual communication, a knowledge and understanding of how meanings are constructed and ‘read’ is fundamental to becoming a knowledgeable citizen and a critical consumer of information.
‘… artists create a language of symbols for things for which there are yet to be words … radical innovations of art embody the preverbal stages of new concepts that will eventually change a civilisation. Whether for an infant or a society on the verge of change, a new way to think about reality begins with the assimilation of unfamiliar images. This collation leads to abstract ideas that only later give rise to a descriptive language.’
(L. Shlain, www.artandphysics.com/chapters.html )

We use an inquiry-learning model, enabling individual responses to concept-based tasks. Through making and appraising, resolution and display, students:
•    Define and solve visual problems by using visual language and expression
•    Study a diverse range of artworks and philosophies from various social, cultural and historical contexts
•    Translate and interpret ideas through media manipulation to invent images and objects
•    Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of artworks in contexts that relate to concepts, focuses, contexts and media




Resources

Arts in Education   http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/arts/front_arts.htm

Arts, Neuroscience, and Learning (http://www.newhorizons.org/neuro/zull_2.htm )
by James E. Zull

What can education learn from the arts about the practice of education?
http://www.infed.org/biblio/eisner_arts_and_the_practice_of_education.htm
Elliot Eisner

Learning in a Visual Age 


10 Lessons the Arts Teach


1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it
is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution
and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.
The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.
When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source
and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young
what adults believe is important.


SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.

Arts Advocacy Links

Ideas for Advocacy 
"The arts are not so much a result of inspiration and innate talent as they are a person's capacity for creative thinking and imagining, problem solving, creative judgement and a host of other mental processes. The arts represent forms of cognition every bit as potent as the verbal and logical/mathematical forms of cognition that have been the traditional focus of public education (Cooper-Solomon, 1995 The arts are essential. School Arts, 94, (6), p. 29.).

Teachers have known for many years that young children often understand more than they are able to verbalise and their understanding can be observed in behaviour other than verbal. The arts use their own unique symbol system of visual, aural, verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. When children participate in activities in the arts, they are involved in using both non-verbal and verbal forms of communication.
..."Humans invented each of the arts as a fundamental way to represent aspects of reality; to try to make sense out of the world, manage life better, and share these perceptions with others" (Fowler, 1994) because a single form of representation is simply not enough.

While the arts have been grouped together in a single key learning area, it must be remembered that each art form is unique and what is experiences and learned in one art form cannot be duplicated by another. Children should have access to all the arts and experience dance, drama, music, visual arts and literary arts programs that present a developmental sequence in line with the particular discipline’s knowledge base. To merely "dabble" in one or two of the arts is akin to "dabbling" in language or numeracy.

Arts education must be a strong force which fosters a widespread and general creative life as a counterbalance to the forces of mass production and mass consumption in a specialist materialistic society. The voracious demands of the latter will progressively displace the former unless the importance of the arts in education is strongly and widely asserted (Commonwealth of Australia, 1995, p.7 Arts Education. Report by the Senate Environment, Recreation, Communications and the Arts References Committee.)."

From: Developing children's full potential: Why the arts are important

Dr Neryl Jeanneret, Faculty of Education, Univeristy of Newcastle 

http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/learning/k_6/arts/kids_potential.php

References

• Commonwealth of Australia, (1995). Arts Education. Report by the Senate Environment, Recreation, Communications and the Arts References Committee.
• Cooper-Solomon, D. (1995). The arts are essential. School Arts, 94, (6), p. 29.
• Dreyfuss, R. (1996) Speech at the 38th Annual Grammy Awards February 29, 1996.
• Eisner, E. (1982). Cognition and Curriculum: a basis for deciding what to teach. Now York: Longman.
• Fowler, C. (1994). Strong Arts , Strong Schools. Educational Leadership, 52, (3), p.4.
• Gardner, H. (1985). Frames of Mind: the theory of multiple intelligences, New York: Basic Books.
• Jeanneret, N. (1995). Developing preservice primary (elementary) teachers' confidence to teach music through a music fundamentals course. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sydney.
• Perrin, S. (1994). Education in the arts is an education for life. Phi Delta Kappan, 75 (6), p. 452
• Reid, L.A. (1986). "Art and the arts", Assessment in the arts, Ross, M. (Ed.), Oxford: Permagon Press.
• Reimer, B. (1989). A Philosophy of Music Education, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. (second edition.)

 
 THIS MAY ALSO BE USEFUL: LOTS OF LINKS:
http://artsmmadd.com/advocacy/