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Collages: Making Art
Painting, and Painting Over
The children take something, absorb it, find variations. They’ve come up with the idea of cutting out diamond shapes and adding yarn or ribbon for “kites.” Lizzie uses short lengths of yarn, all different colors, threading the pieces through holes she’s punched all around the diamond. Caroline makes a happy-face kite and a sad-face kite and a plaid kite. Graham sees Alyssa’s paper with pop-up shapes, and he makes one, too. A few children still seem peripheral—Sam, Henry—but I’m beginning to see, in all this action at the long table, a sense of the group.
Art: eight children are squashed around the table near the sink, leaning over each other to sort through piles of colored construction paper, reaching for a hole puncher or a marker. Art—collage and construction in particular—has become a focal activity for this class. If a class is to come together, it must come together around something that students genuinely care about.
Art resists adult judgments based on right and wrong; an infinite number of possibilities exist in every medium. One child may be “talented,” may display precocity—an intuitive feel for decoration and design, a strong sense of color, an uncanny ability to observe and draw. Yet all children are capable of producing work that is felt, work that displays their individual strengths. Art is work, a process that engages children’s capacity for understanding, one that culminates in a product that can be shared, and that communicates that new understanding. A study undertaken by the Guggenheim Museum found, in fact, measurable improvement in the critical-thinking skills of children who participated in an art program sponsored by the museum, compared with skills of children who did not participate.1 Children can come to see themselves as insiders in the world of art, rather than mystified outsiders. This happens when schools encourage children to produce work that is truly theirs, alongside others who are similarly engaged, and when schools provide children with opportunities to look at and talk about the work of exhibited artists (whether through museum trips or use of reproductions). When children participate in these sorts of experiences, they not only gain a vocabulary, but they learn to take for granted their ability to understand the meanings and values inherent in art. They see art as work, produced by people, and for people.
Art is one of the first activities I plan every fall. I put out fat markers and crayons, and large heavy-duty plastic shape templates—squares, triangles, diamonds, circles, and rectangles. The first few days, children trace and color; one of them will discover you can use the templates numerous times on the same paper, superimposing shapes and creating new forms. As children continue to explore and gain control, I add, over several days, scissors, tape, hole punchers, ribbon, yarn, and eventually glue sticks. The slow introduction of these tools and materials gives me a chance to demonstrate their use. The first lesson, every year, is a demonstration of how to put the marker tops back and—as described in chapter 2—listen for the click. I make sure children hold scissors the right way, show them how to tear tape and screw a glue stick up and down, and watch to make sure they put materials back when they’re finished with them. So while art is arty—expressive, free—it has another side; teaching it carries a load of skill and routine and necessitates a focus on learning good habits of care and use of materials. It includes reality-based conventions and techniques (remember to wipe your brush) at the same time that the central focus remains, the requirement that children put their seeing on paper.
Working on a collage
Photo by Julie Diamond
Art, by its nature, suits young children’s expressive needs. Young children, like babies, find pleasure in movement for its own sake and produce art through physical motion. Their art is often full of circular shapes—swirls, spirals, arcs—created as they swing their arms back and forth and around. They love inventing and repeating forms. They love the sensuous pleasure of mixing colors. Children often apply colors with great concentration and care, only to paint over the entire surface, creating a monotone and murky surface. While adults find this incomprehensible, the process of adding layers of paint gives children immense satisfaction and a sense of power, as they make colors and forms appear and disappear. (It is the same pleasure and power young children feel when they “crash” a block building that they have worked on with energy and commitment.) For the most part, children who have had plenty of painting experience as three- and four-year-olds are less likely to paint over; they are more interested in producing bold and deliberate explorations of line and form. Using paint (or crayons or other media), they organize their visual world. Children have, I believe, an innate sense of design, and without any instruction will spontaneously make use of pattern and symmetry.
As children move toward representation, they begin to give concrete form to themes that are highly personal, e.g., by drawing themselves and family members. They articulate particular motifs—child, house, flowers, sun—that have both real and symbolic meanings; year after year, children all over the world repeat these themes. In representing actual things, children create a world of their own desires, integrating this world of fantasy and imagination with the realities of technique and mastery of materials. By serving all these purposes, art deserves its position in early-childhood classrooms.
“How Did You Make That?”
The point for me, as the months pass, is to see how certain themes recur with each child, and to see the way that some projects—projects they have essentially invented themselves, through collective action—take hold of the class.
I studied painting and drawing when I was young, and more recently began making prints. Perhaps because art is a primary means of expression for me, I was predisposed to give it a significant place in classroom life. In other classrooms, teachers’ interests or predispositions may lead them to support other kinds of experiences that help shape the identity that a class develops. Vivian Paley and Karen Gallas, two teacher-writers, have written extensively about the stories and plays children make up, and the jokes they tell. Paley and Gallas describe how children’s narratives snowball and create elaborate and ritualized class tales and themes. For this class, it was art that contributed significantly to the class’s identity and gave the class a theme; art that threaded itself through the day, with each child influencing others as they tried out and interpreted others’ ideas. It was art that gave a role to certain children, a way to contribute to the class—children who would otherwise probably have been outsiders.
In addition, art introduced this group of children to work, or rather, to the kind of work they would continue to do all year, work that was both exploratory and disciplined. Children’s work, as I see it, is a formulation of their experience, something that grows out of their involvement with content and materials. It’s easy to see this when a work of art expresses an idea. I remember, from years ago, a four-year-old’s drawing of a bulb, after we’d planted bulbs. He had drawn the bulb, a round brown shape, and then covered the entire paper with brown crayon, explaining that it was the earth covering the bulb. The work of drawing, of representation, was an extension of what this child understood. But I see this quality of thoughtfulness whenever children are fully involved with art materials—they make judgments and express concepts as they find out what they can do with the stuff they’re using. In this way, art establishes the power of children individually and as a group to claim content. It establishes their (relative) freedom to define their work for themselves. As they do this, they gain confidence in themselves as capable and committed makers of objects.
A critical component of art work, as I understand it, is an acceptance of the unknowability of the end product. I’ve had to learn this for myself, as I’ve faced struggles with my own art work. Whenever I’ve held on to too definite an idea of the image I want, I’ve resisted the changes that occur as I work. I’ve had to learn about the inevitability of mistakes; again and again, I’ve learned to give up any notion that it’s possible to control the p
rocess. I’ve had to learn that mistakes are not only inevitable but necessary and useful, and that dealing with them—untangling some knot—takes us somewhere unexpected. Nothing beats the pleasure of producing something that did not exist before, something that my own manipulation of the materials brought into being. Yet the process is certainly daunting, and perhaps it is the very unknowability of the outcome that scares those teachers who are determined to control what happens in their classrooms.
Significantly, not all teachers see art as real work, as an integral element of children’s intellectual development. For many teachers and administrators, art is an extra, allowed only after children have finished their “work.” For these teachers, children’s desire to draw is something to be used as an incentive to motivate children to complete other assignments.
In many classrooms, what’s called “art” is something else entirely. It is all too common to walk into classrooms to see twentyfive identical egg-carton caterpillars. Children are shown a model and given a set of instructions in order to “create” the product; the closer the resemblance between the student’s product and the model, the more successful he’s been—in the teacher’s eyes, and his own. There is no room for exploration, discovery, independent thinking. Teachers hand out photocopied sheets, e.g., showing the life cycle of the frog. Children color in, then cut and glue the pictures in the right sequence. What children learn is that their own efforts to conceptualize and represent are inadequate. Power to conceptualize lies with adults; children’s “work” is to—literally—color in. Grade after grade, children’s confidence is sapped, and they come to say, “Oh, I’m not artistic,” or “I can’t draw!”—having lost faith in their expressive capacity.
When children engage in art as I understand it, they are also being introduced to a set of relationships that concern power and authority in a classroom. If children are to be “in charge” of their work—making the important decisions, and doing the thinking that lies behind the decisions—teachers must trust them and be willing to share authority with them. The teacher’s role shifts, without diminishing in importance: someone who can provide additional materials, ask probing questions, make comparisons, or find a relevant resource, a dictionary page when a child wants to draw a particular animal. The teacher also ensures that work is shared: I make the decisions about time and space—I allow public space for their work. By taking time for the whole group to look at and discuss work, the individual child’s insights, knowledge, and thinking are made public, something others can participate in and build on. We all listen as Graham talks about his block building the “Lincoln Memorial.” Afterward, Sam draws it; thus we (they, with my aid) create a class culture, something necessarily unique, from these shared projects.
Through their art experiences, as children crowd around the table near the sink, they are, in effect, creating a group ethos of work. They are defining work as something powerfully personal that at the same time arises in a social context and connects them to others. When someone shares work, a child will inevitably ask, “How did you make that?” The child who’s been questioned goes into a long explanation, “First I drew the face, then I . . .” Teachers dislike the question, as they wonder how long to let the child go on; to them, it’s unnecessary, but to the other children, it’s the question.
As children help each other, the role of one child or another grows, depending on that child’s knowledge of methods and materials: Alyssa was having problems making things stay attached and I sent her to Rosie. Of course, making Rosie an expert is a great thing for her. At any point, a child’s power depends on what that child can offer to others in the group. Thus, the social nature of their work together changes classroom relationships: the teacher is no longer the sole authority, and children’s shared problems and solutions engender a sense of community.
Yellow Skin and Orange Hair
There’s a huge amount of energy in projects of their own devising: today, at the art table, this work with toilet paper tubes and pen tops, which Rosie had started, in a modest way, a week ago. They work on mat board or shirt cardboard. Brooke made a great building, with lots of stuff, Rosie a four-story construction. Graham made faces, clever and symmetrical.
As the children make aesthetic judgments, they do so in myriad ways. One child likes symmetry, another loves action and movement. If children are allowed access to art materials, encouraged to work with seriousness and conviction, they develop a style that can be instantly recognized. Through their judgments and decisions, their idiosyncratic use of materials, the way they put crayon or paint to paper, children not only define the material, they define themselves. Philip draws minipictures, packed with information. One of his drawings shows an amusement park he went to with his family, with three different rides, one for children the age of his little sister, one for children his age, one for older kids and adults. Another of his drawings shows the Amtrak station, with luggage on luggage carts and boards with train arrival and departure times. Philip’s love of information, his intellectual organization, comes through clearly in his art.
By age five, when children arrive in elementary school, they have evolved definite selves, amalgams of innate temperament and lived experiences. They have their passionate interests, concerns, topics, humor: a style that is theirs. They move through the classroom in distinctive ways. When Henry walks around the classroom, his shoelaces are loose and he bumps into things. He writes his name illegibly; his drawings are hard to read. Yet he frequently chooses to draw or make constructions, and his drawings are complicated and full of action.
Henry worked on one drawing for all of work time, then explained it to me. I was quite amazed—I’d forgotten this is exactly his style. The drawing reminds me of Philip’s train station drawings; it’s a whole world.
By the spring, Henry is reading fluently. Marcus, Henry’s opposite in certain ways, moves with grace and rhythm, never walks if he can dance, either across the room or on line to lunch. He, too, loves drawing, but his drawings are easy to read. He makes clear outlines and colors them in, adding rainbows to everything he makes—rainbow boats, rainbow dinosaurs. He is not as well prepared for academic work as Henry and doesn’t even know all the alphabet letters. For Henry, art slowly becomes a link with others in the class. For Marcus, art was from the beginning a tie to others, always an indicator of his social involvement.
The distinctive manner in which different children use the same materials tells me about them: I see children’s selves in the way they pace themselves—Caroline’s crashes, her enthusiasms. Caroline, with her production of kites, each one made in a fast and furious way, defines herself through sheer quantity of production: her work is quick, sometimes sloppy. I’m likely to find half-begun pieces of work, abandoned, while she’s moved on to the next piece of paper. She never has a fallow phase; I am always pushing her to come back to finish something. In the course of the year, I see change, as Caroline becomes more able to push work to completion without losing her ebullience.
Looking at one piece of work, teachers sometimes misread its meaning. Some misjudgments are a result of the expectation that development proceeds at a uniform pace. But growth does not occur evenly: Rosie did a great face, bright yellow skin and orange hair, loopy circling lines. This level of work seems to come out of nowhere: months of drawings that seem disorganized and wispy—then this, confident, competent. Discovering a misinterpretation can be helpful; it’s a sign of the teacher’s struggle to see children fairly, without prejudice. If we come to a conclusion about the meaning of a piece of work, can we confirm it? Do we find the time to ask children about their work? If we find ourselves caught short, surprised, the chances are that we are coming closer to describing work accurately: Today, Henry drew page after page in his art class sketchbook. It may have been that he wanted to get to the last page, in order to take the sketchbook home—he’d asked when he could take it home. On one page, he’d drawn something and was going over it again and again, with these
attacking lines. It looked to me like a destructive impulse. I called him up and asked, Can you tell me about this? He said, It’s popcorn popping.
The more a child’s personal qualities and predilections inform the process of making art, the greater the child’s motivation. When teachers impose decisions, and negate or minimize children’s choices, they find themselves battling against children’s energies. There is, of course, an underlying and inevitable conflict between school as an institution and young children. Young children feel things with immediacy, and group settings always impose some restraints on children’s individual impulses: “Wait!” we say, “Not now!” Yet to the extent that classrooms can channel and engage children’s unique selves, to that degree their energy will enrich classroom life.
Mixing Media
Art work is a way of playing with shapes, materials. Play engages children, allows them extraordinary flexibility, the possibility of invention, of trying out endless ideas, because there is no linear right-wrong, no label of “better.”
Young children’s ability to think “as if,” to place few limits on imagination or on the transformation of objects and materials, can be observed in all their dramatic play, their sensibility and their view of the world. They easily cross the border between what they want to believe and what’s factual and verifiable. A piece of cloth can be a baby; a pencil, a rocket. Yet while children are animists, with the ability to give things life and to turn objects into other objects, they are at the same time realists. Fantasy, for young children, often serves some practical, real-world purpose. Their ability to move without a passport between these countries—the inanimate and the animate, the real and the wished-for—is one of their great resources.
Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning Page 6