Journal Entry #1

Journal 1: Discuss your best art experience in school. What made it so memorable? What made it such a good experience? Discuss your worst experience of art in school? What made it so memorable? What made it such a poor experience?

I found it interesting, when asked to relate my best and worst art experiences as a child, how clearly each stuck out to me. It has always been interesting to me the experiences children remember that their teachers probably do not. As adults (and future teachers), we often make an impact without realizing how large that impact will be.

My mother taught my kindergarten class because we lived in a very small town and there was only one kindergarten class to go to. I remember very clearly the day we were doing cotton ball snowmen. As per usual, we had to cut out a photocopied snowman, glue him on construction paper, and cover him with cotton balls.

However, I cut and glued much faster than the other kids, and I was bored sitting and waiting for them. Deciding to be artistic, I took my markers and drew all over the snowman, which of course was not the point of the craft. My teacher (and mom) wasn’t too upset with me, but I did have to cover all the marker drawings over with cotton balls. This is the first time I can ever remember feeling that as an artist, I was being asked to conform to what everyone else was doing. It’s intriguing that I can still remember this first instance of conformity in such clear detail.

Years later, when I was in sixth grade, we were being taught to paint. We were doing our own versions of Monet’s Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies. The exercise was to teach us how to look at a work of art and then reproduce it ourselves. I learned a lot about art through that project. It taught me about light and reflection. I remember being proud of the painting.

It is interesting that although the second project was a project of conformity, I felt that it was a good project. There is something worthwhile about being taught the basics of art before you create yourself and learning skills that will improve your own creative process. With the snowman, I was bored and unhappy with a craft that didn’t let me express myself. In the Monet painting, I expressed myself and found my creativity improving.