Maryalice Little is a harpist who has been training as a certified clinical musician with Harp for Healing. She inquired to have an opportunity to use her therapeutic music in a youth art program. First Friday Art Club came to mind and we immediately got busy planning the event.
The beautiful harp
The plan we created was for Maryalice to play several musical pieces, each with a different tempo and rhythm, including recognizable music and improvisational sounds. For each song or piece of music played, students were given a different implement to make marks on their page. We started the class with graphite pencils.
Something Familiar
Since pencils are a familiar medium for most students, familiar imagery developed during this segment. The goal for this class was to let the harp music speak to the heart and create marks on paper using a variety of media. Making marks is a unfamiliar concept to students who usually have an assigned image to create. It is very rare for students to test the range of mark making, but it is highly valuable to the artistic process.
Let the music lead the way
The Tate Museum website describes a mark with this excerpt.Mark making describes the different lines, dots, marks, patterns, and textures we create in an artwork. It can be loose and gestural or controlled and neat. It can apply to any material used on any surface: paint on canvas, ink or pencil on paper, a scratched mark on plaster, a digital paint tool on a screen, a tattooed mark on skin…even a sound can be a form of mark making. Artists use gesture to express their feeling and emotions in response to something seen or something felt – or gestural qualities can be used to create a purely abstract composition.
Process through the music
Thinking of sound as a mark, the room was full of inspiration. Allowing the music to inspire the physical marks on paper set aside thoughts from the day, problems in one's life and kept students in the present time. This process does not require much thought. Process feelings and thoughts through the music and leave them on the page.
Dedicated mission
Even with a light and simple expectation for gestural marks on paper, some students had a dedicated mission to continue their daily sketches. Sometimes comics shine in any medium.
Graphite to Color
After testing graphite pencils, students switched to colored pencils for another option with a different musical set. This budding artist started to respond to my own erratic scribbling and let the shapes fly into repeat.
Marker Marks
Colored pencil transitioned to markers. This was the favored media for most students. This class preferred markers over all our media experiments. "It's so close to painting." said one very vocal student.
Oil pastels
The last segment of the class introduced a mostly new medium to the class. Oil pastels are fun to work with and glide over paper so smoothly. "They make your hands dirty!" complained one student. I was happy to hear they had the opportunity to experiment with oil pastels in the past. Despite oil pastels making hands easily messy, they provide a blending option not possible with markers or colored pencils.
Free Flowing
Maryalice ended her musically inspired session with a free flowing, improvisational piece that jumped around and had no recognizable rhythm. This student reflected that free flowing feel by experimenting with oil pastels. She appreciated the texture the paper revealed when the pastel was scribbled across the surface. This revelation is most often the spark for new work with an artist. Test the waters and work with what floats best.
This wraps up another fun First Friday Art Club at the Southeast Steuben County Library. Check back here in November to see the wondrous creatures developed during Calligraphy Birds & Beasts with Wynn Yarrow.
