Integrated Art Workshop for Children Session Introducing Children to Modern Painting

Workshop Lesson for February 19, 2017

Sunday 3 pm, Rotor's Residence San Vicente, Ilocos Sur

Dr Abe V Rotor [avrotor.blogspot.com]

Organizer and Instructor

Teachers’ or parents’ guidance needed in understanding this article.

Modern or abstract art expresses deeper meaning through impressions, expressions, thoughts, and ideas.  Here is a painting (right) by accident (serendipity) . It is an abandoned palette board with a brush intact with the paint. “Where has the painter gone?” is its given title.  It suggests a story, and a subject of a song, drama, or simply photographic art.

 
Kids like to paint abstract, sometimes out of real subjects. An abstract should not be mistaken for an incomplete work - or one abandoned by the artist. Abstracts are products of fertile imagination. When asked, a young painter simply quipped, “Wala lang.”  But we can’t underestimate the richness of his imagination. 

 

Impressionism paintings, gateway to abstract art. top, fireworks, leaf impression,  waterfall; lower  photos, aquarium, experimental paintings with no specific subject.

Abstracts may be a product of inadequate talent, or poor expression of it; it could be vague like a poor argument, hence it may be meaningless. Kids must be oriented properly; this is a great responsibility of the instructor. Art is not an alibi of lack of genuine and sincere purpose. The artist on the other hand, must be true and faithful to himself and his viewers, to the profession in the various forms of art, notwithstanding.      

Art evolved – and still is – through movements or schools, in this simplified order: primitive or ancient art (drawing in caves), realistic that is true to the subject, classical (perfection and timelessness is the essence), romantic (mainly for the elites), realism for the grassroots, impressionism and expressionism (gateway to modern art), and modern art is usually referred to as abstract, which blossomed into various and virtually free expressions.

Here is an exercise to illustrate abstract art: Views from an Airplane
Leaving our world down below and seeing it as a miniature. How small it is! Rather, how small we are! As the airplane we are riding on soars to the sky we lose our sense of familiarity of the places below us. Then our world which we left behind appears as a miniature. And we are detached from it, and resort to the power of imagery. Such is the order from realism, impressionism, expressionism, and ultimately to abstractionism. Show your work for critique-analysis to your instructor.