NOTE: The following comments are coming from a high
school art teacher who teaches one class of 7th grade
art...The book that gave me the "caution light" on
making art "in the style of" was Sydney Walker's book
Teaching Meaning in Artmaking (Davis pub.). One
example she gave was of a student using Kandinsky to
teach about confusion (which I am assuming might lead
to an activity about creating confusion)...when,
infact, his work was "...informed by ideas about
reality and abstraction and spirituality". I think the
original intent of "in the style of" for these posts
was about the appearance of the work, but it has been
my experience when I start showing work by known
artists to my students, they always want to know what
the work is about...I sometimes would do the same
thing that Walker's book talks about- but now I am
very careful to know as much about the artist's intent
as well as what the work looks like- After much angst
over "in the style of", I think what I try to do now
is use the works of known artists to show how several
artists approached similar content... Show examples of
how several artists use "light". If I see one of my
students working in a particular manner, I try to show
them examples of artists work that are similar to
theirs...or if a student is stumped I point them
towards artists who have explored similar ideas.
Sometimes I still use "in the style of" but I pull
examples of several styles and the style part is not
the main objective of the lesson. For example- the
first work my art III and IV students are working on
is a response to one of the following sentence stems:
I feel, I sound, I smell. I pulled about 6 prints of
different artist's works for them to study as ways to
show their idea. Funny, NONE of them are using the
styles of the artists in the prints. I only added that
twist thinking, new year- maybe want to experiment
with a new style... I guess the answer is no from
them...and the works look pretty promising.
Interesting.
Amanda
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Somewhere in Texas there is a village without an idiot.
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