top of page

Setting and Context

 

     In the spring of 2015, I had the distinct pleasure of working with two exceptional students in a 2D Artistic Abilities class. My two mentees were Ashley and Nick.

 

     Ashley is a 23-year-old young lady with a loving mother and older brother. In class Ashley was enthusiastic and excited to work, but she would often become unfocused. As a student who wishes to be constantly moving, she would prefer to bounce back and forth between two or three art projects rather than working on one for the entire class period. Ashley is a social butterfly, and Artistic Abilities gives her not only an opportunity for artistic expression but also some time to visit with old friends and new people. Ashley is an avid lover of all things to do with CSU, specifically cheerleading and basketball!  After getting to know Ashley a little better, I found she had a little anxiety about when it was time to leave, instead of cleaning up she would become preoccupied with going to the other side of the classroom to call dial a ride to make sure she got home. I soon found out that if students were not outside immediately, dial a ride would leave the students behind, making her anxiety understandable. We soon figured out a perfect schedule for cleaning and then calling. Her anxiety also came into her art making a little bit though as well, in art she has very specific comfort zone, and she loves painting flowers, all the time.  Her paintings are very schematic, include baseline and organic flower forms that are a mix of stereotype and schema. I soon determined that these flowers were representative of her favorite type of environment, an environment that she found comforting, and it was something she could go back to if trying new art making things made her too uncomfortable.

 

     My second student Nick, was a very pleasant student, but much less verbal than Ashley. It took a few classes before Nick was comfortable around me, and answered best to yes or no questions. The main thing that got him talking was colors, Nick loved colors and describing how to mix them, where you can find them, and how happy they make him. Nick is a quiet and focused artist, in nearly every class, no matter what medium he would work in, he would focus on color mixing. His form of praxis was very much about doing, in his case mixing colors, and in the action of doing, he would reflect on the colors he was making, he never seemed to have a end product in mind.  Many of his art works reflected Rhoda Kellogg’s shape stage, as he would create mandalas that filled up the page.  The compositions Nick would create were all slightly different, but came out of the colors he would mix or paint straight from the bottle; the compositions reflected the artistic tendencies of young children; Nick displayed an avoidance of overlapping, a repetition of successful configurations, and tendency towards balance. 

 

bottom of page