Children and Series

The more that I work in the classroom, the more I realize that children naturally work in series. Working in a repetitive and experimental fashion is necessary for learning and discovery to happen. Once a students finds an activity or process that they enjoy, they have no qualms about repeating the activity in various fashions until they have mastered it. Interestingly, this behavior is also present in the processes of professional artists. It is a wonderful thing to camp out on an idea for an extended time, such as Picasso's infatuation with a single color during his blue period, or Lee Bonticou's fascination with black holes...

Under the leadership of one first grade student, three boys create a series of thumbprint and stamp drawings. The subject is, of course, aliens. The variety of forms invented by these young artists is marvelous. 

This is another small series by a 5th grade students who got her inspiration from Japanese writing she found in a book. She responded be creating works with her own made up symbols. She also requested that the three works be displayed together since she saw such an important correlation between all of them.