Art Journal #11

4/24/22

#WeatherAsArtist

I apologize in advance because the beginning of this journal entry is going to be a tad more negative than the entries prior.

For Family Day, our Art Education cohort was tasked with creating a variety of art experiences for all ages in an outdoor setting. I don’t know about the rest of my cohort, but I personally found it very frustrating to guide students in art practices amid 50mph winds. It was really difficult for me to get excited about participants’ creations during this entire process because of how cold and windy it was.

As compared to our previous experiences working with the Gregory Allicar Museum this semester, we had to combat transferring our lessons to an outdoor space and to people of all age groups. This transition was difficult and I wish I would have considered these factors prior. Luckily for Nikki and me, our Identity Key Chains had great differentiation aspects for different ages and weren’t as susceptible to the wind as the paper in other lessons/projects. But, I feel like we could have better planned the layout of our materials and created simplified signs and instructions for parents/families to read. On that note, another huge difference in this experience was the presence of families during the artmaking process. Families were there to help their children with their art and also dictate what they made. It would be interesting to see what young artists make with the same materials in the presence of their families and without.

But like everything in life, I considered this to be a learning moment and an opportunity to complete more research.

I thought to myself, there are so many contemporary artists that rely on the outdoors for their studio spaces. Nature is integral to their process and philosophies as artists and researchers. So I looked into what some artists had to say about this and the adaptions that they make for their work.

I looked at the work of Vivian Suter.

From the Art Institute of Boston:

“Vivian Suter (b. 1949, Buenos Aires, Argentina) works in close partnership with the natural environment surrounding her home and studio in Panajachel, Guatemala. Her method often involves moving her canvases between the indoors and outdoors and exposing them to the climate in order to allow nature to commingle with her broadly painted swaths of vivid color. Inspired by the surrounding vegetation and landscape, Suter’s gestural compositions work in concert with rainfall and mud puddles, with the light that passes between branches and the animals in the forest. A place of tremendous beauty and plant and animal life as well as the rich, indigenous Mayan culture, Panajachel and the area around Lake Atitlán has also witnessed countless disruptions throughout history, from active volcanoes and numerous floods to Spanish colonization and a thirty-six-year civil war that ended in 1996. This installation of layered and suspended canvases invites visitors to discover her unique dialogue with imagined and natural worlds.”

What the author of this bio didn’t mention was that those numerous floods and volcanoes actually buried Suter’s work and her studio. Initially, they thought their work was ruined, but then they realized that their paintings were “geographical things…ecology.” They realized that the natural occurrings of the earth deeply informed her work and made it what it is today.

So, how can the natural occurring of the earth inform our student's work? And how can we utilize the outdoors as a studio in spite of the weather?

So, back to Family Day. How could we as future art educators embrace the weather and utilize it as an art practice? The thought of the weather informing art reminded me of one of our Art Education Faculty candidates, Jeff Cornwall, and his dissertation on “leaks in the classroom.” I remember that he spoke of an experience in which he was teaching elementary art and it started raining outside. So, he had his whole class stop what they were doing and record the drops and movement of the rain from the windows and outside. They would use this information and respond to it in their work.

How might have altered the experiences that we created for the museum and embraced those 50mph winds on Family Day?

The answer to this question is evidenced in this week’s contribution to the painting that I have been adding to throughout these journal entries.

For this entry, I am embracing the wind that we experienced on the family day by recreating it by blowing through a straw and documenting its effects on my work.

I have been wanting to deepen the indigo blue for quite some time as I have worked on this piece. So, I have created an Indigo pour/tone that I have poured on the edges of these surfaces. Then, to emulate the winds, I am using a straw to let the wind dictate my mark-making. Next week, when this dries, I will respond to the “wind marks” in a way that informs this idea of weathering as a process.

Here is the process: