THE COMPLETE EARLY CHILDHOOD ART PROGRAM

1. Chapter 9 THE COMPLETE EARLY CHILDHOOD ART PROGRAM

2. Objectives • After reading this chapter, you should be able to: • Describe and give an example of each of the four components of a complete early childhood art program. • List and explain the three major divisions for categorizing artistic styles or movements. • Use the art critique to discuss a work of art. • Discuss the importance of art education in the early years and how national standards relate to early childhood art education. • Contrast DBAE with an approach that is based solely on child-centered, creative self-expression. • Provide developmentally appropriate collage activities for young children.

3. The Importance of Arts Education • The arts are worth studying simply because of what they are. Their impact cannot be denied. Throughout history, all the arts have served to connect human imagination with the deepest questions of human existence: Who am I? • The arts are used to achieve a multitude of human purposes: to present issues and ideas, to teach or persuade, to entertain, to decorate or please. • The arts are integral to daily life. The arts are all around us from the design of the cereal box at breakfast to the format of the late-night talk show. • The arts offer unique sources of enjoyment and refreshment for the imagination. They explore relationships between ideas and objects and serve as links between thought and action. • There is ample evidence that the arts help students develop the attitudes, characteristics, and intellectual skills required to participate effectively in today’s society and economy. The arts teach self-discipline, reinforce self-esteem, and foster the thinking skills and creativity so valued in the workplace. They teach the importance of teamwork and cooperation. • Arts education benefits the student because it cultivates the whole child, gradually building many kinds of literacy while developing intuition, reasoning, imagination, and dexterity into unique forms of expression and communication.

4. By the time they have completed secondary school, students should be able to do the following: • Communicate at a basic level in the four arts disciplines: dance, music, theatre, and the visual arts. • Communicate proficiently in at least one art form, including the ability to define and solve artistic problems with insight, reason, and technical proficiency. • Develop and present basic analyses of works of art from structural, historical, and cultural perspectives, and from combinations of these perspectives. • Have an informed acquaintance with exemplary works of art from a variety of cultures and historical periods, and a basic understanding of historical development in the arts disciplines, across the arts as a whole, and within cultures. • Relate various types of arts knowledge and skills within and across the arts disciplines.

5. In Kindergarten through Grade 4 • Young children should experiment enthusiastically with art materials and investigate the ideas presented to them through visual arts instruction. • Creation is at the heart of instruction. • Students learn to work with various tools, processes, and media. • They learn to coordinate their hands and minds in explorations of the visual world. • They learn to make choices that enhance communication of their ideas. • Their natural inquisitiveness is promoted. • They learn the value of perseverance.

6. Studio-oriented Dominates teacher training and influences current thinking and practice with respect to early childhood art A child-centered, creative self-expression approach Discipline-based A comprehensive approach to instruction and learning in art, developed primarily from grades K to 12 Designed to provide exposure to, experience with, and acquire content from several disciplines of knowledge, but especially four fundamental art disciplines: art making, art criticism, art history, and aesthetics Studio-Oriented versus Discipline-Based Arts Education

7. Studio-Oriented Art for Early Childhood • Young children should be left free to experiment with creative materials. • Stresses a studio approach while going beyond mere art production.

8. Sensing and experiencing Aesthetics Making art Learning about art, artists, and their styles A Complete Early Childhood Art Program

9. In other words, a complete art program for young children includes: • Sensory experiences • Beautiful and creative experiences • Time, space, and materials for making art • An introduction to the world of art, artists, and a variety of art forms and styles The first three components should be emphasized during the early years, and the fourth component gradually introduced.

10. Sensing and Experiencing • Children may be uncomfortable discussing, writing about, or drawing things they have never directly experienced. • It is dangerous to assume that all children know about and have experienced libraries, hospitals, airports, stadiums, skyscrapers, elevators, cathedrals, post offices, seashores, or museums. • Encourage parents to take children places and discuss what they have experienced. • In your classroom, provide as many hands-on experiences as possible through field trips, classroom visitors, and real objects that the children can explore and manipulate.

11. Aesthetics is the study of beauty—not the Hollywood view of glamour, but beauty in color, form, and design. Aesthetics

12. Children can use their senses and their bodies in their pursuit of beauty. Classrooms or centers can be aesthetically pleasing places and models of beauty. The room should be clean, bright, and colorful without being chaotic, cluttered, and gaudy. It should appeal to the senses and have things to look at, listen to, touch, smell, and taste. Flowers, plants, animals, soft pillows, a rocking chair, and a piece of sculpture add an aesthetic touch to the room. Aesthetics (continued)

13. Young children need to be personally expressive and creative and to experience success through art. Teachers can help children see the relationship between art and experience. Teachers can encourage children to give artistic form and substance to their ideas, urges, wishes, dreams, fears, or interests. Making Art

14. What is art? Art is a basic human need. People make art to reflect and symbolize their existence. Learning about Art, Artists, and Their Styles

15. Who are artists? Children’s interest in and study of community helpers can extend to artists. Children can learn that while some artists make art for a hobby, others do it as a career. Some work at home, outdoors, or in studios. Some artists exhibit and sell their works in galleries. Famous artists have their works exhibited in museums. Children can also learn that artists work in different media. Learning about Art, Artists, and Their Styles (continued)

16. Prehistoric or Primitive Art • Era: 25,000 years ago during the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age 10 to 15,000 years later during the Neolithic or New Stone Age • Artists:Unknown cave artists • Cave artists mixed their own paints out of plants, berries, and other foods as well as earth, mud, and clay, most likely mixed with animal blood. They used sharpened sticks to draw and etch pictures. Cave artists liked to draw simple stick-figure people and animals, including leaping bison and deer, using only a few lines. Outlines were bold, and pictures were decorated with geometric patterns and designs. Proportion was correct.

17. Naturalistic or Realistic Art • Era: 1700–1800s (Naturalistic) • Artists: • Honore Daumier • Francisco Goya • Rembrandt • Era: Nineteenth century on (United States) (Realistic) • Artists: • John James Audubon • Winslow Homer • Edward Hopper • Georgia O’Keeffe • Norman Rockwell • Charles Russell • James Whistler • Grant Wood • Andrew Wyeth • Both terms emphasize the artist’s attempt to make art objective and like the actual object. During the 1700s and 1800s painters attempted to portray life exactly as it was.

18. Impressionism • Era: late 1800s to early 1900s • Artists: • Mary Cassatt • Paul Cézanne • Edgar Degas • Eugène Delacroix • Raoul Dufy • Paul Gauguin • Édouard Manet • Claude Monet • Berthe Morisot • Camille Pissarro • Pierre Auguste Renoir • Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec • Vincent van Gogh • Impressionism is an artistic style in which artists painted what they perceived rather than what they knew to be there. Impressionists were fascinated with color, sunshine, contrasts, light, reflection, and shadow. They were concerned with making only a quick sketch of an object to capture its essence. Later they rapidly filled in their crude outline with intense patches of pigment. They used color and light to represent the artist’s impression.

19. Pointillism • Era: late 1800s to early 1900s • Artist: • Georges Seurat • Pointillism, an offshoot of Impressionism, involved a concern for color and an innovative technique for representing it. Pointillists worked on large canvases, spending as much as a year or more on one canvas. Small dots or points of pure color were used instead of Impressionist dashes or strokes. Pointillists were concerned with the complementary relationship between colors. They did not mix colors, but instead required that the observer fuse neighboring colors.

20. Expressionism • Era: late 1800s to 1900s • Artists: • Paul Gauguin • Wassily Kandinsky • Henri Matisse • Piet Mondrian • Edvard Munch • Emil Nolde • Diego Rivera • Expressionism is an artistic style based on an expression of the artist’s emotions and feelings. Expressionists, reacting against Impressionism, searched for emotional expression in their artistic statements. Expressionists purposely altered space, form, line, and color to make an emotional statement that was expressionistic rather than realistic, naturalistic, or impressionistic.

21. Abstract • Era: late 1940s • Artists: • Elaine de Kooning • Willem de Kooning • Hans Hofmann • Jackson Pollock • Mark Rothko • Abstract artists were intrigued with color and the physical qualities of paint: “What can I do with paint on canvas?” Abstract expressionism began after World War II. Design was often left to chance or accident. These painters worked on very large canvases with no concern for capturing reality or shape or for telling a story through pictures.

22. Fauvism • Era: 1910s • Artists: • André Derain • Raoul Dufy • Paul Gauguin • Henri Matisse • Amedeo Modigliani • Georges Rouault • Fauvism is an offshoot of Expressionism. Fauvists experimented with pure, bright colors in daring and innovative ways to represent positive emotions, including joy, pleasure, comfort, love, and happiness. Often there was little concern for the naturalistic or realistic use of color.

23. Cubism • Era: 1900s • Artists: • Georges Braque • Fernand Léger • Paul Cézanne • Piet Mondrian • Marcel Duchamp • Pablo Picasso • Juan Gris • Georges Rouault • Cubism is the source of all twentieth-century abstract art. It seeks an intellectual conception of form and shape. Cubists attempt to break everything down into its component geometric or architectural shapes. How can three-dimensional form—including the back, side, and bottom—be represented on a two-dimensional flat canvas?

24. Kinetic Art • Era: 1920s • Artists: • Alexander Calder • Marcel Duchamp • Why must art be flat and motionless? Kinetic art attempts to incorporate physical movement by using levers, gears, and movable parts. Kinetic art invites participation. People interacting with kinetic sculpture cause it to move or change. Wind also causes the hanging objects on a mobile to move.

25. Surrealism • Era: 1900s • Artists: • Marc Chagall • René Magritte • Salvador Dali • Joan Miró • Jean Dubuffet • Meret Oppenheim • Max Ernst • Man Ray • Raoul Hausmann • Henri Rousseau • Frida Kahlo • Ben Shahn • Paul Klee • Surrealism means super-realism. It attempts to create a magical, dreamlike world that is more intense than reality. Dreams, images, fantasies, and the subconscious are chosen as subject matter and portrayed either realistically or abstractly. Objects, space, symbols, size, perspective, time, and shape may be distorted, transformed, or superimposed.

26. Pop Art • Era: 1950s • Artists: • Jasper Johns • Nam June Paik • Roy Lichtenstein • Andy Warhol • Pop art (Popular art) makes a social statement or critique of contemporary American culture. Pop artists chose subject matter that was familiar to everyday life—soup cans, soft drink containers, movie stars, cartoons, and other examples of advertising art. The common, taken-for-granted product becomes art. Although obvious in subject matter, these objects were represented, often in repeated fashion, with painstaking, realistic detail.

27. Op Art • Era: 1960s • Artists: • Frank Stella • Victor Vasarely • Op art (Optical art) was an artistic style that developed in the psychedelic 1960s. Op artists were intrigued with the effects of black and white, color, figure-ground relations, and depth. They used the principles of optics and perception to create optical illusions with shapes, lines, and patterns. Wiggly and concentric lines and patterns suggested movement and form in the eye of the beholder.

28. The Folk Arts • Era: late 1700s to 1800s, through contemporary times • Artists: • Grandma Moses • Clementine Hunter • Charles Wysocki • Faith Ringold • Folklife or folklore is an integral part of social life because it describes the beliefs, customs, values, behaviors, and practices common to a particular cultural group of people. The folk arts are the expressions of members of a cultural group. They are produced by individuals for the use of their own folk group members and made by hand rather than mass produced.

29. A Simple Breakdown of Artistic Styles • Realistic or naturalistic—attempts to represent people, places, and objects exactly as they appear. • Abstract—bears only a partial resemblance to the object being represented; the object is somehow streamlined or distorted. • Nonobjective—involves a creative play with color, shape, line, and design; it is abstract art pushed to the limits; what is produced bears no resemblance to any actual object.

30. Art Critique • First, a teacher provides some background information about the particular piece: • Who made it ? • What the artist was like ? • What the world was like at the time ?

31. Five Points for Art Critique 1. What is it? • Is it a painting, drawing, batik, weaving, or print? What are its physical properties? Is it big, small, square, round, solid, moving, or framed? • What is it made out of? Did the artist use paper, paint, metal, clay, or yarn? 2. What do you see when you look at this work of art? • Encourage children to focus on the artist’s use of line, color, shape or form, mass or volume, design, pattern, space, balance, and texture. How are these artistic elements used? What shapes do you see? What colors were used? Can anyone find lines? 3. What is the artist trying to say? • Try to put the artist’s picture into words. What is the message? Pretend that this is a book with pictures. What words go along with the picture the artist has given? Discuss what you see: people, animals, buildings, or events. 4. How does it make you feel? • Do you feel happy, sad, angry, scared, or funny? What does the artist do to make you feel this way? 5. Do you like it? • Why or why not? What is it about the work of art that makes you like or dislike it? How would you change it?