Special Ed Drawing

Probably the most outstanding artistic experience I have had as a substitute teacher's aide for Special Education children took place when I was closely monitoring a boy of about 13 years of age who can not talk but who can follow some simple directions, walk, eat and generally take care of himself.

One iof the main academic goals for this child is to get him to write his own name in block letters--a skill which he cannot do though I helped him practice for perhaps fifteen minutes every morning for several months.

I accidentally discovered something artistic which he could do however and which delighted him to do.

If I would place a sheet of paper on his desk, he would draw one long line down the middle of the page and then decorate the page with small dashes of lines on both sides of the central line. He never tired of this exercise and I enjoyed helping him do it.When he would cover a page with little dashes, I would place another sheet of paper in front of him and he would start all over again with the central line and the dashes. To make it more artistic, I would put down colored paper and change the color of his felt-tip pen for variety, but he never tired of doing it.

Of course, since he could not talk and seemed ,to live mainly in his own world, I could not guess the meaning of his drawing.

This compulsive behavior is not so very odd, for an artist, by the way.

I have recently looked into some of the paintings by the famous Spanish painter, Juan Miro, who made  name for himself painting basically the same bizarre symbolic paintings for most of his very long career. He loved to include a stylized ladder, for example, in many of his paintings and painted it again and again and again from his earliest drawings to his last works as an old man.

The artist.

His work.

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Special Ed Aide

I have been working most recently as a substitute teacher's aide in Special  Education classes--mostly in public school classrooms for kids in the elementary grades.

It has been good work for me. I feel helpful and feel like I am doing something which I can do which needs to be done--and, of course, it is a paying job which is also handy.

I like working with kids, especially in these classrooms, where there is a responsible professional teacher in charge and usually other adult help for discipline and care,

I have been able to help a little bit in their art projects which is the area of "education" I am most interested in at this time--though most of my work day is spent in other odd duties as needed.

Some of the kids are pretty well coordinated and are able to draw and color a bit and enjoy a variety of craft projects but many are not able to do very much or really understand very well the purpose of their artistic activities.

Here is an example of one of my fifteen-year old student's work:

And here is my sketch of the same student with his adult aide:

 

As you see--this student is not very coordinated with his use of crayons, but he does like the one-on-one help from his adult aide and seems quite pleased with his artistic creation.

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Paul Klee

Paul Klee.

When I was a college student at Midland College, a Lutheran school in Fremont, Nebraska in the l950's,  I discovered this Swiss/German artist and studied everything he had created available to me in the art department of Midland's little library.

Klee's poetic and whimsical style really caught my imagination at this formative period in my life.

Heavily influenced by Klee, I drew and painted a lot of small pictures based on Shakespeare and other poetic themes

I wrote to the Paul Klee Stifung in Basel, I think it was,  asking for information about the artist and they, probably hoping I was a rich American, sent me a beautiful color catalog of Klee's work--free.

My artist aunt, Nila Clayton, was working for Disney at the time  helping create the Small World exhibition at Disneyland which was perhaps also influenced by Klee's artistic style though he had died in 1940-- a refugee from Nazi Germany in Switzerland.

Some years later, as an itinerant traveler and artist  in Switzerland, I traded watercolor paintings for room and board at the hotel Grand Vareina in Klosters and visited the art museum in Berne where I saw several of Klee's original paintings

I have been figuratively bumping into Klee on and off all my adult life--"So blau wie schnee, so Paul wie Klee"--in Hesse's "Journey to the East" and so forth-- and  feel in him a kindred spirit--though I am far from being the serious and rather driven intellectual of his Teutonic type.

Here is my portrait of this 20th Century artist:

Paul Klee (1879-1940)

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Walt Disney

Hello.

Continuing with the portraits I have recently made of some of the well-known artists of our day, I present today probably the best known of them all: Walt Disney.

Disney started as an artist---that is with a pen in his hand--but his real talent seems to have been recognizing opportunity and being willing to risk everything on what he thought would be a good, creative move--founded on the latest artistic technology, moving pictures.

That he was a success is apparent by his direct legacy, the huge Disney Corporation which, many years after his death  controls most of the video entertainment of the Western World and which influences world culture at almost every level.

Materials available on his life story show him to have been keenly interested in his business activities, a tireless worker who hired the best artistic talent available to anyone in America, and a person who was sincerely interested in giving expression to the cultural values he held dear.

That he was also lucky and born in the right place at the right time is also obvious--but his fame and fortune were certainly dependent on his own personal drive and skill in working with other creative, and often egotistic people. He was apparently a generally healthy, happily married family man and was very fortunate to have had a very skillful, talented and totally supportive younger brother--a regular "Theo" to his more fortunate "Vincent".

People who worked for him and knew him intimately admit that he was one of the best story tellers they ever met, and it is as a wonderful story-teller that most of us who grew up in his time know him best from his movies and television programs.

Walt Disney (about 1945)

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Creative Workshop

Hello again.

My "Creative Workshop" is not just a place. 

I move around far too frequently for that. 

And it is not composed of just certain regular workers, friends or contributors because sometimes people drop by and work with me or us for a little while and then leave and I never see them again.

Some of my fellow Creative Workshop people are my students which I see on a regular, even daily, basis for a semester or a year and then they go on to other teachers or work and very few keep in touch for any length of time.

So my "Creative Workshop" seem to be more of a state of mind.

I keep plugging along because I like art and I like to be "creative" because that's the way I like to be.

Today I will show you a sketch I made of myself and a photograph of a very young artist that came to our Creative Workshop once or twice when we were meeting in the activities room of an old people's home in Escondido, CA:

 Me, Tomasito.

A good beginning.

That's all for today.

Thanks for dropping by.

Tomasito

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Dali and Picasso Framed

Some of the most interesting of my papier mache projects lately has been the creation of frames for some of my pictures.

Yesterday I showed you two of my latest color pencil portrait sketches in a series depicting great artists.

Here are those same drawings mounted in my hand-made papier mache frames:

The above is a copy of my original drawing of Salvador Dali with the 3-D addition of a row of five papier mache eggs on a papier mache shelf addition to the papier mache frame. (Salvador was very fond of egg imagery.)

This is a large papier mache "copy" of my original drawing using a "mosaic" of color scraps from magazines instead of paint. The original drawing is eight and a half inches by eleven inches--this picture, mounted on cardboard, with frame, measures nineteen by twenty-four inches.

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Now in Eureka, CA

Now we live near the mudflats in Eureka, CA.

Don't we move around?

We like the changes of scenery and the changes of mood in different parts of the world and we think the best way to get to know the world for us is to move around. We like to stay in every new place  for a long enough time to walk all the paths until they are quite familiar, do some work, met some people and check out the plants and animals. Breathing the different air and hearing the different sounds are important to us too.

I have been working full time and part-time with the special education people in the Eureka public schools--not so much with the craft workshop aspect of the kid's educational program, as with their whole schooltime activities.

We have been here more than a year now and recently I have had more time to work on my own projects--mostly papier mache and colored pencil sketching.

Here are two of the drawings I have made:

Here is a sketch of Pablo Picasso--probably the most influential "fine" artist of the 20th century

...and a sketch of another great 20th century  artist, Salvador Dali.

I am enjoying studying the lives of these well-known aetists and it is quite interesting for me to sketch  their portraits from videos or photographs.

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