Creativity Camp at Yavneh Academy

Last June at Yavneh Academy, I worked with my friend Kim Corbet to present an arts camp.  We and our students explored creative writing, music, visual art, and performance.  This is a mixed-media piece we created together, on wood panel, four feet by eight feet. 

·         We began by responding to the natural woodgrain of the panel.

·         We started adding individual figures, improvising as we went.

·         We spent a lot of time standing back to consider how to unify the painting as a whole.

·         We took turns playing “dictator.”  The person wearing the dictatorial fez decided what the painting needed, and assigned tasks to everyone else.

·         We added interesting papers.

·         We added three-dimensional objects.

·         Every person brought an object that he or she was sad to part with, and donated it to the work.  The personal meaning of each object was also donated to the work.

·         We ended our week-long camp with a performance in which we played music, shared creative writing, and unveiled this painting.  The finale of the performance was a percussion improvisation in which we interpreted the painting as a musical score.  Participants (and even audience members) took turns wearing the dictator’s fez and pointing to various regions of the painting to be played.    

 

More details:

 

 

Weaving in the Mountains

Ok, this isn't a canvas, but I loved what happened last summer when I was with my family, camping in Idaho.  We had the notion to create a collaborative weaving with whatever we could find.  First I strung a warp in a tree, using some orange twine my dad had on hand.  Then my nieces and I collected grasses, flowers, moss, sticks, etc. for the weft.  We left the finished weaving as a surprise for the next campers.