Where Do Ideas Come From?

Where Do Ideas Come From?

An Evening with Jimmy Gownley

I attended the book launch for The Dumbest Idea Ever last night at Hooray for Books. 
Cartoonist, Jimmy Gownley drew throughout his presentation, creating characters to illustrate five sources of creative ideas. 
He encouraged audience participation and had us all laughing with his stories and spontaneous comic characters.
So where does Jimmy Gownley get his ideas?

1. Inspiration - Sometimes they just come to him, maybe from a doodle or listening to music, something spontaneous. 
He also noted that inspiration becomes more likely with practice - drawing, writing, playing music A LOT gets you ready for those moments of inspiration. 
2. Yourself - Jimmy encourages telling stories about your own life.  He even said that the more embarrassing the story is for you - the more likely it will make a GREAT story for other people to read! 

3. Other People - After yourself, other people's experiences, those of family or friends also make great inspiration for stories. 
With other people or yourself, it is not about telling exactly what happened but using what happened as inspiration in a story.  His example last night was a friend who "sneeze barfed" at dinner.

4. Your Medium
Medium is artist-speak for what you use to make stuff.  For Jimmy this is comics so he used an example of how different types of speech bubbles around the word "WOW" can make you say the word in different ways.  This is something comics can do that other kinds of writing can't.  It is interesting to think about other artistic media and what they can do.  For me I love collage because it can create something new while also reminding people of familiar stuff.  (See COLLETTE for examples of this).  What is unique about your favorite medium?

5. Influences
Influences can be stories, artwork and artists you like.   Jimmy described his own influence from a comic where the character who didn't speak just had thoughts written all over his shirt.  Jimmy took this influence and created a speechless character who wears pajamas and his emotions are shown on him with emoticons.
Finally, the kids in attendance got to call out a character (boy, girl, animal), a job and a favorite movie or book.  The group then worked together to build characters around these ideas. 
This also seems like a great way to get started creating your own characters and stories at home. 

Children's Art: How to Appreciate, Enjoy and Display It

It was an honor to be a part of the panel at this event at Carroll Square Gallery on January 19.  I was truly impressed with the crowd that gathered on a cold Sunday of a holiday weekend to come out for fellowship and discussion of the children's art.  For me, it was great to get to present beside one of my most important mentors and to realize that although my path as a professional has taken me to a different kind of work, my work with Tracy Councill was truly foundational in developing my own ideas on children's art and the power of building relationships through art.

  Tracy began the discussion with a talk on three elements to keep in mind in looking at children's art: development, expressive qualities and relationship.  She elaborated on development, describing how children's art provides a constantly changing and evolving visual record of how children see and represent the world.  Each stage in development is unique and children are constantly growing and changing in their perceptions; their art is a wonderful record of this.  She also spoke about the expressive qualities of children's art and the importance of seeing childhood emotional experience as real experiences with the same power of feeling as adult emotions.  She spoke of how art can allow children to express and then see and reflect on these powerful emotions.  Finally, my favorite part of her talk was on relationship and the importance of relationship in the studio and in the art making process.  Children need to feel safe, respected and able to grow at their own pace in a supportive environment.  This is what I remember most about my time in the studio with Tracy at Lombardi Cancer Center.  Not only did the studio and art therapists provide a safe and supportive place to create art, there was something about sitting together creating that opened people up to connecting and developing relationships through shared experience.   For my part of the talk, I built on Tracy's idea of relationship in describing my work at Art at the Center.  We are a community based studio lab for children and families.  We are process-focused and aim to provide time, space and materials for children and families to explore and create.  Knowing child development and sharing Tracy's fascination with getting to watch these stages unfold is an important part of working in this way.  Process art is also about letting go as a facilitator and letting the participants lead you through sharing in their process.  My favorite thing that happens in the studio is when a child delights or surprises ME with a creative solution to a problem.  I believe the studio offers a unique opportunity for building empathy between parents and children because of the inherent vulnerability of creativity.  Many adults are still intimidated by art making and so are not too far ahead of their child in ability when they enter the studio.  I love watching adults learn and explore alongside their children and hearing children share their expertise with parents on different materials and processes.  It is not unusual for young artists to know more than their parents about clay and the firing process.  The ateliers of Reggio-inspired schools are a source of inspiration for my own space.  An atelier is place for exploring ideas, emotions and theories through the use of materials in a supportive space.  The latest project for Art at the Center is to encourage the extension of the spirit of the studio into homes through my new books designed to build on shared reading time and to help families begin the process of creating together with printing and collage. It was delightful to have COLLETTE: A Collage Adventure and Oops Paint be a part of the event.  Thinking about children's art in homes, the final presenter, Shazalynn Calvin-Winfrey  shared thoughts on ways to catalog, preserve and display children's art in the home.  I was interested to learn how much she notices that early environment influences personal taste in her interior decorating clients.  She shared ideas for display that included mounting, matting and framing as well as using ledge shelves to be able to rotate a collection as more art comes home.  It was wonderful to see her own images of her two children's art sprinkled throughout her home, often amid displays of pottery or painting by professional artists.  She really got my attention when she said how even though her children may not notice or even think about their art at home on a regular basis, when they look back they will remember their creations as being an integral part of their daily living.  We teach children what we value by how we set up our environment and take care of things.  The question and answer session also included other ideas for cataloging and displaying children's creations including recording sculptures with digital photography, keeping portfolios, and inviting children to tell and record the stories of their creations.  
A rich question and answer period and discussion followed the presentations and it was great to be among a group of people so dedicated to children's art and creativity.  Hemphill Fine Arts did a lovely job displaying the art and Shira Kraft was a wonderful resource hosting the event.  Thanks who all who came out to join us!

Light The Night 2013

Thank you to everyone who joined us for Light the Night 2013 and many thanks to Jessie, Cassie and Jenna for help with the photography for this event.  Slideshow of images below.  Enjoy!!

More Optical Illusion Portraits!

Here are more examples of kid created optical illusion portraits including a few from Halloween with their costumed creators!
Look for werewolf, cheshire cat, and other creepy characters.

 

For step-by-step instructions for getting started with making the eye illusion, read on to the blog post below.

Optical Illusion Portraits

Ever wondered how those portraits in scary movies seem to follow you with their eyes?  Here are simple instructions to create your own portrait with eyes that follow wherever you go...

Have an adult help you cut two oval holes in a paper plate.  

 Cut off the handle of a white plastic spoon and draw an eye with permanent marker in the spoon.

 Tape the spoons to the back of the plate so the eyes show through the holes.

 Turn over to see the eyes peering through your plate.

 Decorate your plate with a unique character drawing.

Notice how the eyes seem to follow you as you look at your portrait from different sides.

Have fun - we'd love to see your faces!  Email pictures to kathryn@artatthecenter.org

Remixing Ideas on Making, Project Based Learning

This is a remix we began in the studio the first week of the course.  I posted the ideas from Mitch Resnick's article in the studio and invited young artists as well as adult visitors to put a dot next to ideas they like and add additional ideas on a blank piece of paper.  Below is an image of our wall so far...

Here are the original ideas... 

Start simple

Work on things that you like 

If you have no clue what to do, fiddle around 

Don't be afraid to experiment 

Find a friend to work with, share ideas! 

It’s OK to copy stuff (to give you an idea) 

Keep your ideas in a sketch book 

Build, take apart, rebuild 

Lots of things can go wrong, stick with it

(Resnick, M, 2007)

And here are our new suggestions...

(You may notice some redundant themes but with different wording - another good example of remixing!)

Just change their idea if you copy

Tops!

Put things together and see what they make

Turn a mistake into a piece of art

Keep working 

Don't give up

Let go

Remember that if you sew it will shrink if you turn it inside out

Always do your best, no matter what happens

Use your creativity and your brain

If you mess up make it better

A mess up can become a masterpiece

Experiment like me!

Use as many different ideas as you can

Don't complain if there is a mistake

Be confident

Don't do the same thing all the time (written in two colors for emphasis)

Start small

Be art smart

One of my favorite things that happened with this list was one day when a child asked if she could put a dot next to one of the hand-written ideas.  Of course!  But no one had done this - the question and then this new opportunity brought a flurry of activity back to the wall and others in other classes noticed and added more dots too over the course of the week.

Learning Creative Learning - Week 6 - Social Creativity

The Learning Creative Learning community has been a great example of social learning.  This week the discussion began by looking at the goal of free on-line courses.  Often the goal is just to deliver information to a larger number of people.  However, with LCL the goal is more importantly to bring together a community of people around ideas.

A key way artists, designers and creative thinkers learn in community is through remixing.  Artists are continually inspired by and referencing and combining the work of other artists, both contemporaries and figure from art history.  Remixing is a way to get to know a work or style, to play with it and make it part of one's own work.

Remixing is also a great form of scaffolding for those getting started.  It also leads to building relationships with other makers, to greater connections and collaborations.

Gerhard Fischer and Andres Monroy-Hernandez discussed ways that learning environments can be designed to promote remixing.  In the scratch on-line programming community specific features of the site encourage remixing and make sure credit is given to projects that are used as sources for remixes.  In the studio at Art at the Center we frequently hear the phrase, "I was inspired by..." during our sharing time.  Parents smile at me knowingly; they understand that this is a culture we work to build and celebrate.  Children are encouraged to get ideas from other artists, to give credit, to work together and to remix, to take something and make it their own.

Gerhard Fisher also spoke about how to bridge differences in communities; spacial, temporal and conceptual differences.  On-line technologies help bridge spacial differences as do artistic reproductions.  We have beautiful art books and prints so we can be inspired by other artists without being limited by the availability of the original work.  In the art studio, the space is a unifying force and often helps bridge differences in time.  In one case, a four year old artist and a ten year old artist carried on a visual conversation through paintings although they attended classes on different days each week and never actually met in the studio.  The conversation began when the older artist noticed her younger friends' mixed colors on display and liked their names.  She set about creating beach-themed colors of her own and a series of beach images left each week for the other to see began.  Conceptually, communities bridge differences in backgrounds, age and skill levels when artists have the opportunity to share process and point of view while creating and in sharing their work over time.  Sharing process, challenges, and successes as fellow artists is a great way to build empathy and interest in others.

Environmental and program design can do a great deal to encourage and support program learning.  An idea that really struck me was that of courses as seeds.  How can we design experiences that become starting points for others?  Environments that encourage and even require participant contribution to grow the seed and even to then create seeds of their own for others?

Simple beginning remixes can lead to bigger and deeper connections and relationships, from simple participation to more complex meta-design thinking about how to remix and redesign for new beginnings.  Educators work to support layers of participation within learning communities.  I liked the idea of thinking of it as a social infrastructure around remixing and collaboration.