The most difficult thing for me was getting started. How to, what to, where to etc. etc. Then I just started, drawing a grid on the photograph and on the paper. I wasn’t sure how to start, whether to draw the images first and then paint, or to just start painting. Before I knew it, I began painting shapes of the same colour as in a “painting by numbers” painting. I painted the largest shapes first and was amazed to see how the human figure emerged. The hat should have been a bit more rounded at the top, and not peaked, but the hat is her hat, the head her head, the turn of the neck her attitude, and the curved back, her 99 year old dowager humped back, still regal in her summer silk coat.

Someone at class said it looked like the Queen looking down at Big Ben. She is a regal lady and I’m still amazed how well her attitude was captured…well, I copied the photograph, but still, I’m delighted at how this first attempt turned out.

I didn’t know what to do with the scenery in the horizon outside the window. There was too much detail and I didn’t know where to begin. So I squinted my eyes, saw the dark shapes and began the “painting by numbers” approach. A blob of paint here, another dark shape that looked like a bird over there, and bit by bit, the scene emerged. Amazing. I chose to exclude details of all the buildings except Big Ben on right and a little bit of Parliament buildings on her left.

The sky emerged as well, as I moved in my painting by “numbers” approach, finding where the same colours were located in the grids across the page. The perspective of the window frame was a bit tricky until I began to pay attention to the angles and differing widths between the right and left of the picture.

It worked…amazing…how do you draw glass? You don’t! You draw what you see, and everything emerges.

So I’ve decided that the artist must first deconstruct the images in order to reconstruct the painting. Bit by bit, the deconstructed pieces are laid down on the canvas/paper, and the brain then pulls those pieces together to create a recognisable whole. Is this how the brain works when we look at anything? Perhaps in the process of drawing & painting, we are slowing the process down enough so that each step of “seeing” becomes a separate observable operation.

Much like a toddler beginning to walk…each step is deliberate, shaky sometimes, but distinct and separate from the overall automatic procedure of walking. Automaticity is not yet present.

In the beginning reader, automaticity is not there. In the young person learning their multiplication tables, automaticity is not there. The artist, experienced or novice, works in a similar way. There is no automatic act of rendering an image unless you are a camera. The act of drawing or painting, requires the accumulation of a number of steps, shapes, colours, angles, bits and pieces of the whole which the brain pulls back together into a composite whole.

An artist has to be able to see parts within the whole. The artist or the teacher, must break Humpty Dumpty into little pieces and have a strategy for putting Humpty Dumpty together again. The strategies for putting the pieces together to make the whole, are what a skilled art teacher can convey to anyone, whether artistically “challenged” or supposedly “gifted”.

Drawing & Painting is about seeing, about understanding and recognising relationships which are in essence mathematical relationships. Ratio and proportion, angles compared to a horizontal or vertical, and recognising the basic shapes, circles and ellipses, triangles, quadrilaterals and the combination of these.

You also begin to see light and dark, shades, shadows and hues.

This was great fun. Nothing like having the evidence that one is actually seeing. How do we translate this into “seeing” with the spiritual eye, and differentiating the real from the not real.

This was a priviledge to paint my now 102 year old mother and to see her and her hat, emerge. One more thing…I used the analogy of the “melting lollipop” to get going, and gave myself three 45 minute time slots to complete the painting. Not only did I paint by numbers, but I painted by alarm clock.. It worked.!

Think of the applicability of this to your work with students who don’t “get it” immediately. Deconstruct and help them reconstruct the pieces of the whole.

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In other words, I had to TRUST the PROCESS and know that the OUTCOME would be OK. Why is it so hard to TRUST the process, or is it not trusting ourselves?

It wasn’t until I had completed the Collage that I realised that the difference in tones on the white keys, were actually a cast shadow of the open piano lid. In the photo, the colour of the white keys seemed grey and beige. The beige shape was obvious and easy to create. The gray was more difficult. I used a translucent white paper over a gray textured paper to create the graying tinge that I wanted that was not as dark as the gray textured paper available.

The next day, as I sat at my piano, it was the first time that I observed that the lamp on the piano cast a shadow over the keys…something I had never noticed before, but something that was there as soon as the piano lid was opened. I opened and closed the lid, watching that line move back and forth, and understanding a bit more about SEEING things correctly. The light on the side of the black keys was a light blue in the photograph, and even though I use a darker blue in the Collage, the 3 dimensional impression is well realised, something that I would probably not have seen/been able to do, if I had not approached this as an exercise in searching for the appropriate materials to represent what I saw as the bits and pieces of shape and colour that comprised the picture.

I’m impressed with the end result…it came alive and THEN, I saw what I was doing, rather than SEEING before hand, and having a great MASTER PLAN of how things should go….some lesson in there for the rest of life…things EVOLVE, if you just take it bit by bit. Scary, because in the middle of the process it seems like madness and the questioning and self doubt begin to creep in…don’t you have anything better to do with your time? It’s been 3 hours already and this thing isn’t shaping up? Time to quit? Leave art for the artists? Who’re you kidding? Cutting up bits of paper and getting glue all over your hands is for kindergarteners? Time to grow up? As I discard this inner dialogue and just keep plodding on, IT emerges! WOW! I can even see the black key that is ready to be depressed! I can hear it since I have perfect pitch! I can play it! Two Black Keys…maybe I’ll call this Collage, CHOPSTICKS! Good exercise in SEEING, and in STICK-TO-IT-IVENess.

I like it. Good lessons here for teachers in suspending judgement and SEEING the bits and pieces in their kids, until the WHOLE emerges, beautiful in its own right, individual, one of a kind, not to be judged, ridiculed, put down, compared to any other, but to be accepted as a wonderful part of CREATION. Yes, I like my collage.

Probably the most difficult part is knowing where to begin, and then knowing that it really doesn’t matter where one begins, just as long as one does. Just BEGIN…not just DO IT, because the latter implies knowing what IT is. JUST BEGIN, and TRUST that IT will show up. IT did!

It looks simple, and one would think that I should have been able to do it quickly, but it took me 4 hours….what’s a Saturday afternoon for anyway.

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This exercise to paint popsicles, brought meaning to Dali’s melting clocks which never really made sense to me before. The melting clocks show the concept of time as represented by a time piece, in a dynamic not static state. I now had a very real personal experience of time ticking away as I worried that my still life was melting before my very eyes while I pondered how to and where to start the painting. The negative self talk begun to sound louder and louder in my head. “You aren’t a painter. Stop wasting your time. Find something more productive to do.” It is sad to see young children with these negative voices in their little heads, already programmed to feel themselves as “stupid” and “failures”. Our job is to help them replace that negative self talk, which will happen when they begin to experience success.

It isn’t that the struggling learners can’t succeed; rather, it is that they haven’t had the kind of support needed to help them to get started, to show them the process, the need to stay with it and to help them persevere to the end.

As I persevered to the end of this painting exercise, the threat of the popsicles melting into an undistinguishable mess of mush was real. I realized that I needed to get started before it was too late. But I had a reservoir of resilience to draw on. The struggling learners don’t, and we have to help them build that reserve. Under the pressure of timed tests, many of the children give up before they even get started. The pressure is real, and without support they cave and develop a sense of helplessness, of perpetual failure, of not knowing how to start again. They put anything on the paper, put their heads down and say, “I’m finished”. Marking any answer on the multiple choice tests until the entire test booklet is “completed” is not unusual. The pressure to “complete” the test so that they don’t get into trouble, is greater than the need for understanding or taking time to check their work. This “fill-in-the-bubble-test-driven-multiple-choice” era of assessment that masquerades as improving teaching & learning , does a great disservice to the teachers who are not allowed the time needed to teach for mastery, and gives the struggling learners and their parents, the impression that bubbling in the “correct answer” is what school is about, and/or all that they need to  do.    Students have been advised to leave no answers blank, because even if they know nothing, the probability that they will get a correct answer and pass is greater than if they leave it blank.    So they have no idea how to get started with real learning. We have to teach them. 

“Time and tide wait for no man”. Make that Time, Tide and Uneaten Popsicles wait for no man”. Time is fleeting, and is essentially melting like the popsicles. The underlying message from this exercise is that we need to “Just Start It”, not “Just Do It” as  we’ve heard constantly from a  commerical for footwear that I acutally like and wear.   Sometimes we don’t know “how to” or “what to do” and procrastination kicks in while we are stuck in the phase of “pre-doing”, which is essentially, a “pre-judging” of both ourselves and of the struggling learner’s attempts. Suspend judgement. Focus on getting started. Help them to begin, and to keep going before the lollipops melt. Melting lollipops, melting clocks, melting time, unwritten books, lost opportunities. Get going!

Testing pressures on the kids evoke fear. Help them to seize the time available to them, without fear, without self doubt and the negative self talk that says, “don’t try, you can’t do it.” Help them to get going. To “just start it”, and to know that you will be there to coach and support them all the way.  My art teachers have been doing that for me and the negative voices in the head have subsided.  Instead I hear their supportive words of encouragement.  I think art educators are among the most supportive and kind people that I have ever encountered, seeking to really teach and to bring out the best in their students.    We can all emulate their approaches to teaching, regardless of the subject matter.

Art is  a way to understanding.   We’re not including art for art’s sake, which is itself important.  We  including the use of the arts as a critical mechanism in teaching for understanding, something that struggling learners have not had the opportunity to experience.  Teach for Understanding.  Help them to trust themselves, and to just start.

“Three things that come not back, the spoken word, the sped arrow and the lost opportunity.”Omar Kyham.    Now we can add to that, the melted popsicles.

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