The other day we were capable of expressing ourseleves by creating something with mud. I wanted to do a bird (the expression of freedom for me) but I also wanted it to be useful as the teacher commented to somebody. I thought it was a good idea, so I did a hole that I will be able to use to leave the key. I always lose the key, so I thought that was the best I could do. I will leave it at home in a specific place and I will always have my key in there.
After having finished doing it, we left it in the classroom until the next day, in which we coloured it. I used bright colours as I wanted to see it in an easy way. It would not have had sense for me to have painted it in a dark colour because then maybe I would not be able to see it and the idea is to be able to find my key.
I learnt something very important and it is that doing a figure by using mud can be very relaxing and therapeutic. Maybe I will have to do that at home because I get stressed very easily and that really calmed me down.
These photos show the process:
And the final result:
The result may not be as I expected, but I had a therapeutic time doing it and it is definitely useful for me to leave my key as you can see in this picture. I am not going to lose them anymore!
In this entry I want to reflect on a very interesting project we did in which we had to unite music and visual arts. In our seminar, we decided not to do something as a big group but as small groups. Our theme was the different styles of films there are (comedies, thrillers...). Our group had to perform a thriller. We decided to tell a story like in a theatre. There was a party, then a murder, then an investigation and finally...
SPOILER
The murderer was caught.
Our idea was, I think, very ambitious for the little resources we had. The first idea was to do a dance but at the time of the truth, nobody of our group wanted to dance so we had to reduce our visual art in the performance, the creation of a "wall" and the "detective's hat" and the use of lights (moving them faster when the music was faster...).
It seems like a good idea, doesn't it? Well, it did not go as expected. I think that we all, as a group, were not that happy about the result.
What happened?
1. The room was not dark enough for our lights at that hour (we were the first group to perform). We did not have this into account.
2. The first sound the computer had to reproduce stopped and in the next ones something had happened to the volume. Maybe we turned it down without realising it. This made that in one moment, one of the actors did not know that it was already time for her to do her act.
3. There were not walls like in the theatre, so in the end when we wanted to project something, everybody saw a person going there.
4. We tried to make sense to the fact of turning off and on the lights but there was a moment in which the public got confused.
5. Problems in the group. There was a member that did not come to any of the rehearsals. She was one of the main characters. We thought that she would come at least at the last rehearsal, but she did not and we used the last day in order to change the performance. Somebody else had to play that part and we did not have anybody that could do specifically the checking of the light and/or the sound as we planned during all the sessions. She did not participate the day we had to put this into practice because we told her that she could not do it without having done any rehearsal. She was going through a bad time, but all we asked her was to come at least at the last rehearsal, because this is not a project you can do without the others. It was very sad because at the beginning we were all really excited about this project, but it did not end well.
What can we learn from this?
EVERYTHING!!!!
If something does not go well, we can reflect on what happened like we have done and avoid this in the future. Also, watching the other groups was very useful for us to get ideas for a future performance. Maybe with a more simple idea this could work better in the future. We have to have into account that while performing we had to play instruments in direct! This makes it harder and I would have liked for us as a seminar to work together, but the other groups did not want this, so a simple idea would have been definitely better. But you only learn by making mistakes.
We finally did a cover in which we wanted to express the story we had performed: Detective Scarlet solving out a murder! And we added the curtains in order to reflect this "performance" we did, as this was the cover for a film you would see in the cinema or in the theatre.
This is the final video with the cover and our act that day:
And this is the cover we created:
And these are the hat and the wall created for the performance:
So we had to portrait a classmate and then do another portrait just next to it and put as many shadows as it was needed. This allows to give volume to the drawing.
I have to admit that although in the hybrid I finally did quite some good shadows, it was very difficult for me to imagine where was appopriate for the shadows to be. You cannot draw them wherever you want. You have to imagine there is a light, locate it and then do the shadows as they would appear if the light was in there. I still think the shadows are my weak point, but I tried to do my best and I searched for Rembrandt in order to inspire myself. But even though I did that, I still think the result was not as good as I expected. I will have to practice more the shadows but I am improving.
This is the result:
As we can see, the first one is the one without shadows. We can see that in the other one there is more volume. Of course, this will be useful for me in the future to improve my shadows.
Our teacher made us read a text the other day that really impacted me. The text started with a very convincing sentence: "All human beings have the capacity to draw". I do not know what you think, but all my entire life I have lived with this sentence: "I do not know how to draw". I never get satisfied with what I do and people around me have never really felt that what I did was really good even though they all tried to hide it with nice words. So this sentence completely caught my attention and made me want to read more. What the article says is that drawing is our way of getting to know the world, of understanding it and that, unfortunately, we usually stop drawing once we become teenagers. This is because schools do not potentiate drawing as an important aspect of our lives. Actually, Howard Gardner, who made the theory of the multiple intelligences, says that in schools they only work with the linguistic and the mathematical intelligence and ignore all the other ones:
I honestly believe that schools are doing that. I like drawing because it is one of the moments, together with writing, in which I can express more what I feel and how do I see things, but because I have never used the canons expected by other people or adults, I have never felt like my message arrived to the people and I stopped. I only draw sometimes for myself in the borders of a blank paper.
Another sentence I really liked from this text was this one: "Nobody stops writing because they have bad letters or because they are not great writers". Then why do we stop drawing for that reason? Drawing and writing both want to communicate, so why do we put more importance to one than to the other one?
Another aspect I found very interesting of the article was that we are constantly visually reading, but that we do not know how to read deeper. We only see what is in the surface. In an era of technology and screens in which we are living today, we definitely need to know what they are telling us deep down. For example, there was this advertisment from Carrefour:
What can we say? I think everybody can see the problem with this ad. The boy has a "c" of "champion" and the girl a "c" of "cooker". Because everybody knows women are supposed to be in the kitchen and men are supposed to have cars and be the champions (sarcasm). Such a shame that in the 21st century we still have to find things like that. This ad was created in 2018. Carrefour had to get rid of it.
In this case it is very obvious maybe, but would you have thought about it if I had not told you?
This ad is not only giving the message of "el día del niño" and the toys you can find, but it is also putting in your head an idea of what boys should receive as a present and what should girls receive. An idea that, thankfully, we know it is wrong.
The other day we went to Caixaforum, where we saw two very interesting exhibitions: Tolouse-Lautrec and Velázquez.
In the first one, called "Tolouse-Lautrec i l'esperit de Montmartre" we had a guide who tried to emerge us inside the world of the posters and explained us a lot about the movement of the end of the XIXth century. And let's not going to forget about the cabarets! Specially one: the Chat Noir. The truth is that I was really happy to understand more about the Chat Noir because a friend of mine who also played the guitar bought once some strings that had the name of the Chat Noir and the image of it. It remained in my head until one day in History of Art they told me about it. What surprised me in the visit was to find out what the "cat" meant. INDEPENDENCY. ELEGANCE. The independency the artists who lived in Montmartre looked for, not obeying the standards of the Academy. It was the Bohemian life.
Posters took relevance in order to attract clients to the cabarets, but it was not considered an art as other artistic manifestations. Such as it happens today with the marketing somehow.
Why is not marketing considered an art? What is art? Those are questions we should done to ourselves.
Therefore, I think that the exposition was interesting because I learnt new things from an era I like a lot (I have watched Moulin Rouge more than once), but maybe it was because of the guide, I think I got confused in some parts. Maybe the exposition was done too fast. Anyway, I could learn more about Tolouse-Lautrec, who escaped from the canons established by the Academy and helped introducing, together with other artists, posters as an art, an art that could be seen by everybody and that explained the bohemian life.
After that, we went and visited Velázquez's exposition. In this one we did not have a guide, which maybe was a problem. In my case, as I studied History of Art I knew a little bit about him, but I would have liked to have more time. I spent so much time in each painting that the guard had to come and tell me that they were closing. I could not see the last ones. I was very excited because I knew that seven of Velázquez's paintings from El Prado were there and that is the maximum of paintings that are allowed to get out of El Prado. It was amazing to see the paintings I have studied during post-compulsory education. I did not know how the others felt, but for me it was amazing. The seven topics in which Velázquez portraits could be understood (mythology, religion, court...) could be appreciated. These different topics also were shown by paintings of other important painters. I really enjoyed identifying these different thematics and I enjoyed watching the mythology because I know almost all the stories and I could understand the symbolism (Marte can be identified as the god of the war because of all the weapons, for example).
In order to find out how museums bring art to students from Primary Education, we decided to contact MACBA as we found out in the webpage that they have a lot of educational projects. I was one of the members of the group that was lucky enough to go to an exposition and a workshop with a school to see how they did it. Not all of the members of our group went there because they told us that we were a lot of people. So only I and Eugènia Delgado went there.
It was incredible to see how topics so important such as racism, inequality between men and women or war were introduced to the students through the different artistic works. Topics that are so important to work in a democratic society and that can allow us and our students to become citizens engaged with human rights were introduced in a fascinating way. The guide was all the time asking to the children questions that would allow them to contextualise more the topic developed in that painting or sculpture. For working the topic of feminism, they were asked to tell names of fampu artists. Surprise! Almost all of the ones students knew were men.
Art is about thinking about the inequalities in the world, about opening your mind, about becoming a more democratic citizen as Heike Freire would say. Why do we not do this at school when this is so important? It seems like politicians do not want people to think about these thematics... Is it more important to constantly learn about the grammar, about the numbers... and not about human feelings, fights and ways of expression? Art is a way of reflecting what you are feeling, what you see in the world and what has concerned humanity. That is why it is as important as reading and doing mathematics.
We did a written project and a presentation about this experience. As that would be too long and too complicated to do through here, I will just leave you some photos in order for you to get an idea of what it was like. Think about the different topics I have commented you previously.
We had to do a portrait of one of our class mates.
First of all, we had to do it without watching the paper, only the person. In my case, I was portraiting Eugènia Delgado.
And in this one I did look the paper while I was looking at Eugènia. An aspect I want to highlight is that the teacher said that by looking at the person and doing this we were working our observating skills and our concentration, which is something the schools always look for! Why do we not do more art classes, then? That is a good question, isn't it? Maybe we would be too curious and creative? We should really start thinking why schools only focus in maths and languages and not in the different communicative ways that exist. Isn't painting a way of expressing ourselves as valued as writing? Why not?
To compare these two results is really funny as you really see the difference between drawing and observing the paper and drawing and only observing the person.
