abstraction

Today was the first day of our abstraction exploration. I got out the grid paper, markers, rulers, large paper, stencils, and pencils. We started class with a short discussion of abstraction, focusing on the repetitive patterning we found in the student's clothing. Olive had on the most wonderful outfit -- striped pink horizontal sleeves underneath a smock of intersecting circles with an peek-a-boo slip of gray vertical stripes and hot pink tights. Jimmy was sporting wide horizontal stripes of black and yellow on his shirt and narrow horizontal green stripes on his pants. We talked about the tension created by Jimmy's two patterns and the break at his midsection. I introduced the concept of white space and breaks in patterning by looking at the kids' outfits and it seemed to resonate. They were walking canvases!

I asked the students to play with the materials and create sketches that explored line, color and patterning in a variety of different ways. I put the music on loud and asked them to hold back sharing and talking during class so we could get away from the world of meaning and play with marking up the paper without a lot of premeditated thinking.