Visual Arts High School teacher
Art shares blog
As a way to motivate and engage my art students, I begin each class with brief videos of art events, excerpts from artist interviews or of art-creation processes that relate to their artistic journey. Little did I know that the students would respond to these montages by sending me their own art videos, photos, themes and thoughts that they had stumbled upon.
I initially developed the Art shares blog into a regularly updated showcase and repository to organize and share all of these inspirational ideas, but the blog quickly took on a life of its own. The majority of the student submissions emphasized the art process. In contrast, to my own art-education website where I feature finished students’ work (www.hom-mandell.com), I realized that the blog could become its own creative laboratory. I wanted to emphasize student works in progress, capturing raw ideas in their most elementary form, laid bare before the application of shading and polish and final touches.
By interleaving student-generated submissions with photos of students’ works in progress, my goal is to emphasize that all great works of art start with something much simpler, sometimes a fragmented sketch or juxtaposition of forms, or just a simple texture. There is no failure in the art process, and a student must be ready to realize that a stumble can turn into a masterpiece. In addition, I hope that students and educators will come together in support of each other by offering feedback and contributing to the Art shares blog. Feel free to make suggestions or comments to the blog.
