Art has been evaluated and dissected with the intentions of finding a parallel between art and science. The parallel created was among elements; however, elements in art have the ability to overlap and take on other characteristics compared to those on the periodic table. These elements of art combine and blur boundaries to help establish general principles. These elements become blurred further by the artist’s selection of media. With a visual culture approach, it is important to consider that technology morphs the visual arts into a realm of multimodal with sound as an element. Although these boundaries are blurred, there are four factors which influence the ways in which we create visual meaning: objects, space, light, and time. The ways we create visual meaning rely on proper technique, correct formal qualities, and strong concept, or ideation.
A marriage between technical ability and concept creates substantial artwork. It is important to understand that when teaching about the visual qualities that concept must be the driving force to creating art. Student interest is maximized, when concept is set as the priority. Losing sight of the concept of a piece ruins the marriage needed for strong artwork. As an art educator, teachers need to create lessons rooted in concept. Art teachers have many technical skills they can teach their students. This tends to be the easier half to teach students which is why I believe so many educators deprive students of concept without awareness. At the elementary level it may be difficult to find a balance between how much freedom you should give students when it is important for them to develop fine motor skills through technique and new mediums. This is when the spiral curriculum takes an important role in helping your students succeed. Projects that may cater more to technical ability in kindergarten can act as a strong platform for a project that caters more towards technical ability in third grade.
We can break down and study the elements of art and then regurgitate them to our students, but their potential in creating art would never be fulfilled. Art educators need to integrate these blurred technical elements with ideation. With the use of a spiral curriculum, art educators can manage to build students technical and conceptual skills through connection to previous projects. Helping students process the ways in which we create visual meaning widens the opportunity for skills learned in the art classroom to be applicable to student’s everyday life. As much as we focus on making artwork in the classroom, time must be dedicated to understanding the visual work of others through different objects, space, light, and time. Understanding how to make meaning of artwork provides new ideas for students to create artwork. They can understand the visual elements more clearly and be receptive to the ways in which they can be applied to their own work. Analyzing the blurred boundaries in art allow students to imagine new blurred boundaries that were once unimaginable.
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