Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
This amazing morphing of old masterpieces by Micaël Reynaud is worth enlarging. Warning: it’s about 10 Mb and you might just have to keep focused on the eyes to avoid motion sickness.
It’s similar to Philip Scott Johnson video below (you can find information about the artworks used here).
An excellent set of Soviet propaganda posters from How to be a Retronaut. The collection contains a fascinating blend of of triumphalism sprinkled with some attempts at modesty.
The posters make wonderful subjects for the study of propaganda and the space race.
My favorite:
Brian Joseph Davis creates composite sketches of literary characters using the same software used by the police, and the descriptions of the characters in the books.
She was a fine and handsome girl—not handsomer than some others, possibly—but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape… The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word…Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes…a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging straight down her back to her waist.
— description by Thomas Hardy, excerpted by Davis (2010): The Composites.
We took the middle and high school to see the Monet Water Lilies exhibit at the St. Louis Art Museum today. It was a nice tour; we saw some paintings, and we learned a little something about the impressionists.
One thought that occurred to me during an interesting conversation on the bus back to school, was how the development of abstract thinking skills affects our perception of the more abstract art. After all, it usually requires more effort to appreciate, understand and become affected a piece the more abstract it is. Which would suggest that art appreciation would be useful practice for adolescents who are honing their higher-level cognitive skills.
The tour also left me with one unanswered question, however: are we seeing fog or smog in Monet’s painting of the Charing Cross Bridge in London.
London is famous for its fogs, but this painting was done in 1899, well into the industrial revolution, and the yellow tints suggest a pea-souper.
I have a neat little tea strainer that sits inside my almost perfect teacup, yet I’m usually at a loss about what to do with it when I take it out of the cup. When the lid is upside down, the strainer can sit nicely into a circular inset that seem perfectly designed for it; however, if I want to use the lid to keep my tea warm — as I am wont to do — I have to move the strainer somewhere else.
One option is to just put the strainer in another cup, but then air can’t circulate around it, and instead of drying, the used tea leaves stay wet and, eventually, turn moldy. A flat saucer would be better, but not perfect.
Of course, I could just empty out the strainer, wash and dry it as soon as I’m done steeping the leaves, but there are a few ancillary considerations with respect to time that make this a sub-optimal solution.
So, since we have a kiln on campus that sees regular use, I thought I’d sit in on the Middle School art class and make my own ceramic tea strainer holder. Since I’ve also been thinking about Philip Stewart’s spiral, and de Chancourtois‘ helictical periodic tables, and been inspired by Bert Geyer’s attempts at making sonnets tangible, it eventually occurred to me that an open helictical form would work fairly well for my purposes.
I’ve cobbled together a design using Inkscape, and layered it onto a cylinder in Sketchup to see what it would look like.
So far the reactions from students has been quite diverse. I have one volunteer who’s wants to help, and I’ve sparked some discussion as to if what I’m doing actually qualifies as art. There is a lot of curiosity though. The middle-schoolers will probably be doing some type of physical representation of the periodic table, so I’m hoping this project gets them to think more broadly about what they might be able to do.
While I do like to use animated gifs, these apparent animations are actually still images that, because of the arrangement of colors and shapes, your brain interprets as moving. Akiyoshi Kitaoka has an extensive gallery. It comes with the warning though: ‘works of “anomalous motion illusion”, … might make sensitive observers dizzy or sick.’ (Kitaoka, 2011).
We watched Stanley Kubric’s, Dr. Strangelove, today as part of our mini film festival. Most of the middle and high school students got the choice of what to watch, but the Dr. Strangelove was required for the American History students.
My second question during our discussion after the movie was, “What does this have to do with the Cold War?” I got a number of blank stares. The next question was, “Do you know what the Cold War was?” Apparently they’ll be getting to that next semester.
Dr. H tells me that she’s heard the complaint from the college history department that incoming students don’t know much, if anything, about the Cold War. It’s now history. It occurred before any of them were born. Is this a lament? An observation about aging? I’m not sure.