Our Art Club sessions always begin with a few deep breaths to relax, we meet at the end of the day and it's important to rest briefly between School and Art Club.
Following on from last week's Giant Egg focus we have continued to look at the animals and birds of Madagascar and the impact man is having on them, we have combined this with our term-theme of 'flights of fancy' and tied both these themes in to our project with Cupertino Middle School which is in Sunnyvale California.
My involvement with a Worldwide twitter art project called Mail Art has led to an inter-school collaboration with Sylivia Griffin the art teacher at Cupertino. Mail Art is a collective project where a list of artists create pieces of art on postcards, the art is then mailed - without an envelope, one card to each person on the list. Part of the idea is to see what extra marks the cards pick up in transit.
The results of Mailart projects are stunning and the aim is that when each artist has a full set, they exhibit them at their next show - good exposure for every one of the artists. The current round of MailArt has a theme of 'Being human in time', cards can be seen at The Mail Art Flickr Group
Below is one of the cards I drew and sent:
I shall be showing all the results when I exhibit my work at Bear Steps gallery in Shrewsbury in January 2010.
Our school MailArt has seen us each making postcards to send. Sylvia and I exchanged their list of children's names and the school addresses last week, giving only the initials of the children's last names.
We started the session by looking at the progress on the The Giant Egg website - lots more images had been uploaded since last week, the children were very excited by @tomavana's Fire Egg, @fiddlehead Lee Tracy and by @RyanSeslow's work, (names preceded by an @ sign are Twitter names).
We talked about the excitement of sending postcards to another school in another part of the World, how these children would send us cards too. We looked at a map of the World highlighting Sundorne, UK and Sunnyvale, USA and asked questions about where Madagascar was in relation to both schools and what journies our cards would make by plane and other transport.
Then we had another look at the information sheets I had produced about birds, animals and environments and at some more work by Wassily Kandinsky with the children relating his brush-strokes to 'flight' and talking about what they could see within his abstract works.
After our talk the children set to work making their own MailArt cards. With our 'inspiration sheets' on the tables, some music playing and much ongoing discussion, we worked with drawing and collage, with card, pen, tissue, glue, pencil and then had a 2 minute glitterfest at the end!
The results are sensational and I have since varnished the cards and addressed them, in our session on 13th October each child will stick on their stamps and write a small message then off the cards will go, all the way to Sunnyvale, USA.
One of the cards, produced by Ashton, is shown below -
Our cards can be seen on our Flickr page
When we receive our cards from the USA we will post a link to them here.
In our next session we will be continuing with our term-themes and painting four big abstracts on canvases to hang in the school corridor.
