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Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Complexity Planning

Lesson planning is the bread and butter of grade school teaching. Most everything a teacher does revolves around the lessons, of course, and the material form of those lessons should include a fair degree of detail. 

Art educators' lesson plans are somewhat different than other subjects plans (usually more colorful). For one thing, we have to create a, "teacher's sample". Or, we have to actually execute the lesson ourselves before we expect the students to do so. This is the fun part though. We are encouraged to use our own styles (which I actually find it difficult to do because of the technical complexity of my personal work). But in this case, we can approach a lesson plan as we might approach our own artwork. 

Artists don't only do art, they enjoy the work of other artists. So finding inspiration for a lesson plan can often be found in the work of an artist or artists just as we might for our own work. A painter I recently discovered who I might find some commonality in is Oliver Vernon .

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Visual complexity in art is often discouraged. It can also be seen as less conceptually engaging as other works that, while take much less apparent effort to complete, may touch upon a popular talking point of some sort. 

Vernon's work is clearly of a maximalist bent. It strikes me as incredibly refreshing. Prima facie the work appears to merely be about how much can be clearly packed into a picture plane. But to leave one's interpretation at that would leave out all varying forms and subtle connections all throughout his works. It goes beyond mere visual complexity. It takes a great breath of memory to even come up with such a variety of forms. Similar to the way an opera singer's lungs and diaphragm will generally be more exercised than a normal person's.To be able to breathe in the distinctions and distinguish the parts and pieces is a thoroughly enriching and mentally expanding challenge. 

I could go on, but I got somewhat sidetracked. The point is that, an art lesson plan can harness some of the excitement we have about an artist. I have no idea where a lesson including Vernon could lead though :D 




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