MS. BRIZENDINE: Good morning, everybody. Can we get started? One little bit of housekeeping. You will see at the back of the table a yellow evaluation form. The Council really does pay attention to these, and it's important. If you could take the time and fill that out, leave it on the table or give it to Bruce or to anyone on Council, we would really appreciate that. The feedback helps us shape next year's programs and those in the future. Thank you for doing that.
Your poem for the day. This is a poem about a history teacher who cannot bear to tell the truth to his young charges, again, from Billy Collins. "The History Teacher."
Now, I hand it over to Burch.
Penny has done remarkable things since leaving Farmington and then graduating from the New School in New York and getting her master's at NYU. She's somebody who's not only an artist in her own right, but also someone with a powerful social conscience which we will hear more about when she makes her presentation.
She's also somebody with incredible staying power. For the last 24 years, she has been teaching art in elementary school, but she has also been teaching adult education, and for 17 years she has been helping to run a program for the homeless and the hungry in LA, which feeds up to 150 people a night, seven days a week.
She's just come back from New York, as you can see, and has a lot to share with us today. She is not only going to talk to us, but also work with us. So please welcome Penny Landreth. (Applause.)
MS. LANDRETH: I am ancient. But I'm not blond and 19. That's for sure. I am delighted to be here today.
Burch said I had staying power. Well, I love what I do, and I love where I am, and they support art, the art program, so magnificently that I couldn't possibly not love what I do.
Parents come into my room in droves, and they linger at the door because they're actually very nervous coming into an art space. I'm happy to see some of you are sitting in the second row. Usually adults are incredibly afraid of art. They bring out a white piece of paper and ask you to do something.
I just want to test my audience here. How many of you are in any kind of art class? I don't mean writing poetry. I mean really making some sort of marks on a page. I know you're busy. Nobody.
How many of you last took an art class in college or graduate school? Great.
How many of you have a dreadful art teacher story, and that was it, and you never went back? About the same amount.
Before I really start telling you about what I do, and how I do it and why I love it and why I'm so grateful to the center, I just can't help but share my experience of going to see "The Gates" in New York.
My husband and I have just had a granddaughter. The baby was due in New York in the beginning of February, so I thought, Great. I'll be there exactly the same time. It was perfect. The baby was early, I went to New York to be with my daughter, came back to LA, and then thought, I'm sorry. I have to apply for a professional development grant. There's no way I cannot go back to New York. I am a New Yorker for a long time.
So the Center gave me the grant, and I, of course, asked my colleague who teaches K through 2 -- I teach third grade through sixth grade and adults. We got it. She wrote a poem about it. We quickly went to New York and stayed there.
We got in late Friday night, this past Friday night. We got on the bus first thing in the morning. We decided when we would meet the month-old granddaughter, at what stop we were going to meet her so we could all experience "The Gates" together.
As I'm getting off the bus, there is Jeanne-Claude, wife of Christo, standing there with this incredible not-quite-crayon-red hair, not quite saffron, bundled up, and smoking cigarettes. She's French.
I just jumped out of the bus and I said, "We're art educators, and I came to see 'The Gates,' Christo's gates."
And she jumped in. She said, "What?" She reprimanded me fully because I had not included her name.
Now, as a woman and as a woman artist, I should have known better, shouldn't I? But all the press and the books that I had in my classroom, you know, made mention of her constantly and she certainly is the strength behind the man, even though he is the one who does all the drawings and creates all the funds to support this art. But I didn't.
But she still decided she would let me interview her, which we did. Then I felt a little like a character out of a Woody Allen film because I couldn't find the granddaughter, I couldn't find my glasses, I had never used this video camera before, then the battery went dead. It was quite a scene. I'm a painter. I don't do this visual video stuff.
But we got it together and she actually agreed to be interviewed. We're going to ask Reveta to change the slides. This is off the Internet, and not a slide.
This is the bus ride. You get a sense of this very cold New York setting. How many of you have been to "The Gates"? Anybody? Oh, great. And I would love it if you tell me later if you hated it or liked it. In my classroom, I have the entire New York Times experience, and then I read the letters with passion and voice to my students, the pros and cons, because that's certainly what it's all about.
On the bus, getting out, with the yellow taxi right there, and this kind of parade of orange gates.
For those of you who haven't been to Central Park recently, it is 23 miles long. There are 7,500 gates with a clearing of eight feet. So they're 16 feet tall, saffron vinyl poles, and when the lights hit them, instead of looking like sort of shower curtains or dresses, they really billow. And Reveta, the next slide is going to be Jeanne-Claude. There she is. Her cigarette is down by her side. And her orange-saffron-red-burnt- orange -- I don't know what color her hair is -- is stuck under that little fur hat, and she's standing there waiting at an entrance on 106th Street for the sun to come out. She had a photographer with her.
When the sun does hit these, the billowing and the sunlight really does shimmer and the color changes. In her interview she went all through this with us and she was very generous about talking to us, even though I had been remiss in not including her name. We started our journey through the park. Our intent was to find a few children we could interview who were the same age as the children I teach. And what I discovered, which I often do discover, is that when children have not been exposed to an art program that has art and artists and a seriousness to it, they say things like, "Yeah. It's great. It's orange. Pretty. Cool." There's absolutely no vocabulary from which they start their commentary about art.
So we started our journey. And here you get a sense of their billowing. They really are the experience of bringing New York together. The last time New York may have come together in such droves was 9/11, a very serious, different feeling.
So here was a celebration of art, this energizing color marching through these miles of naked trees.
But the letters! If you kept up with the New York Times, there are some people who are clearly outraged that this was put up. You know, I feel like it's a little bit of a curmudgeonly response, as it's only 16 days. How bad can that be? As you're walking through the snow and you're hearing every language, and you're hearing people talking about art. When have I ever heard people talking about art constantly? It was very, very exciting and it falls short in the slides. But it was an incredible experience. I remember seeing the umbrellas in California on the 5, and those yellow umbrellas that dotted those hills. Whenever I drive up north, I can pull out the slide from my memory bank, insert it, and see those yellow umbrellas. So it changes your experience.
And the irony of it is, next slide, when I got back to my in-laws' apartment, they have a huge terrace outside. There was a building with orange construction panels across it to keep the dust in. I thought, These look different, too, don't they? Suddenly your whole vision, being an observer, is being a part of being an artist or being awake, actually. I think we're so over-stimulated we're often not visually awake about anything.
So there you can see the beginning of the shimmering gates and their fabric. There's a kind of noise. There's a texture. They have these great kids from all over the country coming to work there as volunteers. It was really a very exciting, kind of a happening kind of thing.
My last slide isn't the greatest slide, but there's a sense of this journey that Christo and Jeanne-Claude went on, gave to New York City, but I decided to kind of use it for a metaphor for talking to you about an art program.
An art program that's serious I think is a long journey. When I was in graduate school, getting my multiple subject credentials at the Center -- at that point called something else which doesn't trip off my tongue -- it was a college at one point, and I got my credential there for multiple subject credential and then later I taught there.
There was a book called "The Psychology of Children's Art." And "The Psychology of Children's Art" was looking at the process that develops, a catalog. You start out with scribbles. This author claims there are 17 patterns of scribbles. Then they go into faces and outlines. Those of you who have children, have taught children, can probably nod your heads and say, "Yes, I have seen those faces. I have seen those lines."
Then there's an animal standing upright like a human, and the whole point is that children all over the world develop these art marks in the same order. So we have that little icon of a house, little square house with a triangle roof and a chimney on it. That, believe it or not, in this book, is drawn all over the world. You draw it in Africa. You draw it in New York. You draw it in Argentina. You draw it in Spain, wherever you are, in France. That house. She had this book full of drawings. They all had exactly the same kinds of marks making.
I think there's something about that that had a lot to do with how I started to think about an art program, that there is that language of art that is a part of the human instinct. You can't keep a baby from lifting up its head, from crawling, from walking, from exploring. Nothing a parent could do, short of abuse, would stop a baby from taking a crayon. Then you think about the commonality of the marks and human development and you think, this is really quite mystical, actually.
So I think of art as a language. Just as we speak to babies in a different tone, as they get older, we're reading them children's stories. You don't go into a kindergarten class and speak to kindergarten students in the high-pitched tone that you often use with babies. We get silly with babies. Or maybe I do because I'm a new grandmother. I don't know.
So this language develops. As the child is developing and their language capacity is developing, so are the marks. They're changing. And they are actually a reflection of their world. Rudolph Arnheim, a visual psychologist, talked about how the first real drawing that children draw is a face, and the reason is that that's their world. They have been picked up a thousand times by mothers, by fathers, by grandmothers, by caretakers, and so it goes. They reflect what they know. As they stand, their drawings stand.
So at some point, my colleague Keven Barrett, who has also taught at the center as long as I have, gets them in her classroom at kindergarten age, so you might go into her classroom and there will be art books out, and there's conversation going on. If you were a visitor you might be a little bit disappointed because for 45 minutes Keven might be exploring with conversation and having kids look at art posters and talking and trying to follow the shapes of lines and experiencing.
What we're doing is setting a mood, a language, a tone for a seriousness about what we do. We are not about cutting and pasting and gluing, and we're definitely not about coloring books. We want the children to find some sort of artistic, visual language which they will communicate something about either their external world or their interior world.
So when I put these slides up, this is just what I do in my classroom. I took a whole 45-minute period. They say, "Oh, aren't we going to do art today, get back to our project?"
"No, I want to explore this with you. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to go there and bring it back to you." And we took our film, we have one of the artists on camera, and we had interviews.
So with that, since I have nervous parents who come into the back, tiptoe in, what I do at school as I walk them visually around my classroom, I tell them what the projects are about, how I go about it, what my thinking is about it. They're actually quite intrigued.
And then, from that group -- and also teachers and friends and other people -- I have had a lot of adults. And I decided when I moved to California -- we had lived in Greenwich Village forever, I was an artist, we moved to California, and I was in shock. Movies were talked about. I didn't know what to do. I just was completely out of the loop. I felt sort of lonely.
So I established my art adult art class so that I could share this kind of conversation with other people. And we'd go to museums together, but I'd teach them how to get over an adult fear of art. I'll tell you something: A bottle of wine and Miles Davis helps. I can't do that with my students.
But surely the adults are terrified. I have somebody in there now. Really, I didn't know her. She's a complete stranger to me. She goes and grabs my desk chair with wheels on it, complains of a backache and a headache the moment she walks in my classroom. She's taken more psychological training than I'm up for. Really, I'm just not sure I have the right license for her.
So one of my other students found that she's made such a negative impact on the class that they brought in another bottle of wine, which I have never done. I thought, This is dreadful.
Anyway, she's recovering, but when she ended up here two days in a row, I couldn't decide to be happy or sad. I just didn't know what to do. She's changed the climate of the class, but they're pretty resilient and they love the class. They love that they have discovered they have something to say, they can say it with art.
Now I'm going to take you to my classroom. The Center provides amazing classrooms.
This is, again, my technological problem. This is a window view up into the hills of Los Angeles, and right there underneath the window are those cubbies. Those are the portfolio areas for the children's work. They come rushing down the hall, much to the dismay of the teachers on the hall, and walk in the classroom, know where their work is.
I set the room up as a studio. They are to know where the supplies are. They know what we're doing. They don't ask me questions.
Now we're looking at my favorite wall because of that little tiny window there. That often becomes a framework, a reference point of a piece of paper. Like, Well, you're going to have a long piece of paper. Those are windows up there. You have a square piece of paper. And if you walk to the window, you're looking out on Melrose Avenue. You can be very close: Foreground, midground, background. And they can see it right through the window. So the whole room becomes a teaching tool for me.
Those plastic cases underneath all the masks, which you'll see later, are all free-time supplies. As a new teacher I used to worry, what am I going to do with the kids when they're finished? I used to worry about that. Now I realize I'm probably their haven, because when they're finished their artwork -- and nothing happens quickly in my classroom. The masks that you see there, which I will talk about up close and personal a little bit later, take two or three months to do, and they are done by the sixth graders, and they're one of two projects that I ever do the same. I never do the same thing in my art room, because I feel like I'm an artist. I have to respond to current events. I have to respond to the election. I have to respond to museum exhibits I have seen. We have to talk about poetry, have to do something and make it sort of movable feast.
I give them a vocabulary. I give them skills. I repeat it over and over and over again so they can practice. But I wouldn't be able to stay in a job for 24 years if I did the same thing all the time, pull out one of those cranky old filing cabinets, dust off my lesson plans. If you looked at my planning book, you would think I had some sort of learning disability. I had one word in there. "Clay." But I know what I'm going to do. I'm totally involved by it.
So there's that little cupboard right there with all the free-time supplies. When my students come in new, I have to do a scavenger hunt. I have decided that if you keep answering questions like where are the pencils, where are the scissors, where is the glue, where is this, where is that -- I have a master's degree. Nobody needs to be really overeducated for that.
So I have a scavenger hunt. Kids love scavenger huts. They find all the supplies and then I tell them, "I will never answer that question again. That's it."
And of course, they love to try to trick me. And they never have. They'll ask me where the pencils are, and I'll say, "You know where the pencils are."
And they turn right around and walk over to them. So the idea is, they know the supplies. And of course, if something is different, I will answer questions, but I'm there really to help them and have aesthetic decisions made, and talk about issues they're having. They are young, so this sounds all very outrageous that I'm doing this. But when you see their work, you'll see that they, too, have understood why I'm doing this and what it's all about. And also, if I answer all those questions I wouldn't be able to hear all the great gossip that goes on in the classroom, which is pretty intense.
There's my great sink. I have yet to have anybody decide to use it as their spa, but it is fabulous. It's got the pressure nozzle. I stole the design from another private school in Los Angeles. It's just such a great way to get the kids to clean up, to get me to clean up, because the classes come in 45 minutes, back to back. You're in one subway door, and out the other, and I have six classes most days.
That's the setup at the front of the room.
One of the tools that I am a firm believer in, for kids or adults, is something called the contour drawing. I didn't discover this until Betty Edwards came out with a book, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." It's a terrific book. It takes that scary notion of three-dimensionality and proportion and all those things right into another place, because it makes you realize that being an artist is about being an observer, and a very careful observer. She goes into the whole physiological setup of the brain, right brain, left brain. Left brain is verbal, right brain is visual. She makes all these comparisons, and she has you go through exercises, and tries to get you to understand, if you can squash the dominance of the left brain, your right brain will see much more carefully.
So at a very early age, Keven, my colleague and I, set up various contour drawings and we use them for various different mediums and assignments. I found some old frames. This is a third-grade class. I had about six different vases. I set some daffodils in them.
You never use an eraser with a contour drawing. You use a Sharpie marker. An eraser implies right away and sets into action your critical voice. Your critical voice will tell you, "You're not an artist. You can't do it. You have made a mistake."
If you think of the history of art, just think of how many, quote, unquote, mistakes there must be that glow with passion and make us all just love the piece of art we're looking at. And who is to say what these portraits look like? The windows of history are divided into cultures and time spans. We had no technology to divide them. It's just phenomenal. The artists were the recorders of histories and cultures. We don't know if they were absolutely accurate. We take it for truth now, and we also say that those people are good. Those are good artists. The people who can draw in a realistic fashion are good.
But you know, Picasso threw out those rules after he was 13 years old and decided he could draw perfectly and had to find new ways to express himself.
But the contour drawing is the one provided for confidence. So you tell somebody how to do it. "You follow the exterior edge." To the children I'll tell them they're taking a little journey along the edge like an ant, and they are to record what they see to the best of their ability.
Like anything else, with practice, you get better and better and better. And you do. I have had adults come into my class, shaking. This is the first assignment I do with adults. I set up something and have them do it. And if they have never come in, I usually put up something very small right in front of them, because there's an intimacy that is good. And they have had to talk, their husbands, wives, significant others, into the fact that I didn't do the drawing. They bring it home, the other person says, "No, Penny did that for you."
No. They did it. And they're absolutely stunned that they can draw. Anybody can draw. It's riding a bike. You can ride a bike. If you're taught how to see, you can see anything.
This was a contour drawing, too, a fourth-grader. But the assignment here was find an animal who speaks to you. Who are you? What kind of an animal would you be if you were an animal? Make this kid-friendly. So you research, research, research, find an animal.
Then I teach them with oil pastels how to get the texture, the fur texture, how to give that animal personality. You can't see on this slide, but there are some wonderful little whiskers in ebony pencil on his chin. It's very endearing.
We have a huge art fair at the end of the year, and for that art fair, the children select their own pieces that they want shown. They go through the whole aesthetics. "No, I didn't do this very well."
Sometimes I try to generally nudge them to choose one. For the most part, it's their decision. And then we invite various faculty members and staff -- and we rotate this process -- to choose pieces of art that you would like to see all year-round. So we have an art-on-loan program. I get permission slips out, I have them signed by parents and the artist. Some kids say, "No, I'm sorry." This little boy was really torn. "I really love my giraffe. I don't think I can live without it for a year," but finally, there were so many people coming down the hall to him, saying, "You know, you can't give that up. We have to look at it."
It's right outside of Reveta's office now. He's incredibly proud. So they begin to think of themselves as artists. So we have skills being learned here. But there's a heartbeat in there and that really does look like a giraffe.
A dog, same thing. A bunny. And a panda.
When I have my adult class and I have nude models, it's very odd. The nude models usually end up being necks to knee joints. There are no hands, no faces, because adults feel they cannot draw those. Children say, "I can't draw faces. I can't do this."
And then we have what I have discovered is our symbols. Like the house was a symbol when they were little. I as a teenager remember drawing on the telephone. I had a certain face. The face could be done over. It's kind like the back of the comic books. Draw the face and send it in somewhere.
So there's a round icon for a face. There's an icon for hands. There's an icon for feet, and it's usually prefaced by, "Can't do it."
These are the things that people just absolutely shy away from. So rather than being intimidated by drawing your own face, I hook up with a curriculum here. Fifth graders have to choose biographies. They choose a biography, choose someone they want to do, and we have the structure of how you look at a face, because this is about the only rule remaining in art. There really is a structure that fits on the top of a face. I ask them to do a contour drawing. Contour draw the shape of the eye you see. And then the lines with the nose. Contour draw the expressive line of the mouth. That's the line between the two lips. And it actually winds up with the center of your pupils.
Now, all these rules really, really work on everybody's face, more or less. However, I do remember being in a dinner party one night and I was in the middle of a conversation with some elderly German man I didn't know at all. He was fascinating. I looked, and his ears were in the wrong place. So midsentence, I said, "Your ears are in the wrong place. What am I to do? I'm so sorry."
And then, of course, I got completely distracted and frazzled, he was talking to me, I didn't know what to say. It was so embarrassing. And I don't know how I recovered. I didn't want to sit next to him the next time. So sometimes it doesn't work.
But usually there is a strategy for looking at a face. And once it wasn't their face, they weren't so scared. It was somebody else they were doing. I showed them Alan Katz' work, an artist who often makes stand-up portraits of people. I have seen his show at the Whitney. We talked about his work.
They got pictures. Some of the pictures were in the biographies they were working with. Some of the pictures were off the Internet. Some were terrible, good, profile. Doesn't matter. The rules work. And they know how to do a contour drawing.
So here are these faces. Here are some more. In slide 18, this was sort of a risky one. This was a book about Michelangelo, and the face was in shadow. The kid wasn't daunted by it at all. It looks perfectly good. And they're all sitting in the library right now.
They have found their signature. Art is like your handwriting. It has a quality that belongs to you. Artists call this a mark-making. And each child is in an environment which wants them to find that possibility of finding a way to express themselves with their marks.
The artwork up on the walls that you see doesn't look the same. They have the same technique, but it's all different. We tend to think that, oh, girls like art, or, boys like art, or boys will only do these kind of drawings. I have few pictures where you'll say, "You know that's a girl." "You know that's a boy."
Interestingly, we can take that conversation further. We can look at how few women artists are represented in museums. So what I really want to do is have them find a voice that rings sincere and then they actually have ability to be an observer. Being an observer makes them a better writer. Being an observer makes them understand the whole process of being a scientist. Being an observer is really a life skill that I'm giving them.
So I know that I'm not teaching in art school. I'm not even teaching high school students. I'm teaching kids to get that kind of confidence and understand that art, artists, observation, is an important life skill.
Holidays come around, and they're ripe for cliched expression, so I avoid them, sort of. I mean, we acknowledge that there are holidays coming. This might have been Thanksgiving, and I set up a still life of a basket of vegetables and fruits. And again, a contour drawing. This is done with ebony pencil, terpenoid, and oil pastel on craft paper.
While I'm given this wonderful generous budget, and I certainly use it, I often use it for art history prints or books, because if you're wedded to the idea that oil pastel, terpenoid, ebony pencils, and craft paper are the best things you could possibly work with, and the most exciting, then your budget doesn't have to be so grand, because oil pastels are expensive. But wow, craft paper you just buy like brown paper bags. But it's a great process. My adults, once they have experienced this technique, almost never go back to anything else.
Developmentally, you will see the difference in these still lifes, and that's fine. That's their voice. That's their signature. Their handwriting is probably less mature. Their art-making is less mature. Perfectly okay. There are some kids who, when things are behind, it's up. You know how those kindergarten drawings have the sky as a blue swatch across the top, and then this big empty white space, and then life happens down here?
Well, if I make them an observer, I'll take them to my window, and I'll say, "Look out the window. What happens? The sky goes right down to the rest, and sort of kisses the landscape."
So if we're going to try to get them to recover in third grade from that, they need to then be an observer.
Same assignment, interpreted differently.
Same assignment, again.
Now, somebody returned from Paris and brought me a book of faces done by children who were ill in the hospital of cancer. And I actually got cowardly and didn't tell my students that they were ill with cancer. I said they were ill, they were in a hospital, and there was an art setting there. I showed them these faces, and we experimented. What does your face look like? Those rules we have about a face -- what happens when you stick out your tongue, or you smirk, or you do something else? What happens to your facial features? Do they change?
So we explored that at first, and then we talked about the relationship of color and mood. This is one of them. I think it's great. So the rules are thrown out, but there's definitely spirit in this portrait.
This was the aftermath of doing what's called a blind contour drawing. It doesn't mean closing your eyes. It means you are trying to connect the drawing hand with what you're observing, but you're not looking at your paper. Put your paper behind you. Now, I have had adults stay in the bathroom when I have done this assignment. It makes them feel completely seasick. They can't stand it. They said, "I hate this."
But the kids are really ready to do this. So they get this kind of nest of scribbly lines, and they're so wonderful. They kind of pop off the page. And they want to do another one and another one. Pretty soon, two and three classes have gone by, and they have done six or seven little expressive lines, and you can see that they never take their pen off the page. They go around the eye, they come down the nose, they feel. It's kind sort of a kinesthetic experience. They feel the nose and the nostril and mouth.
And then from their favorite blind contour drawing, I give them armature wire and they make a face. Sometimes they change it in midprocess. But that is what artists do all the time. They change their minds. It's a good idea to change your mind, to throw out some of those rules, if you're going to have something that's going to be reflective of what you're thinking about or feeling.
So I love these things. They have been pretty successful. People find them quite magnificent. I think this was a fourth or fifth grade class.
Here's another, again with faces. This was on symmetry. I love black-and-white. These are very powerful and strong. I had to teach them how to get symmetric. What is symmetry? How do you do this? How can you make a face and have expression and be playful? There are a couple of these.
This was another symmetrical project, or not, as you can see by the placement of the papers. I went downtown and got Asian newspapers, Spanish newspapers. What else did I have? I brought in phone books. I Xeroxed music papers. I had a whole array of papers. They were to apply them, these torn papers, on some sort of symmetrical design with starch, and then we put them over this form.
Mask-making is often associated with Halloween. We'll make masks for four or five months, and it becomes an art project.
Here's another holiday assignment. You probably never would call it that. I brought in the ingredients for a pumpkin pie. A sack of flour, egg. I put them all on a table in the middle of the room. Every time they wanted something, they brought it to their table and they did a contour drawing of the shape in two or three forms. I had shown them pictures of people who had worked with collages and cutout and certain ways of using papers. There's that pumpkin and a teaspoon. And the little girl who did this decided to put a hand in, coming in off the picture plane.
Now, I'm using a vocabulary, and I'm sure you all know it, but kids don't necessarily know it, but I use it all the time, so they hear these words over and over and over again, and they understand this kind of art vocabulary.
I read them a book about what things look like at night. If you have a young child, they'll say, "Trees are green." And then I say, "But do they look green at night?" Then you have to think. What do things look like at night? We're not there at night.
I picked this book out, illustrated by E. Bunting, a wonderful children's illustrator. She did a book about gargoyles in Paris that come alive at night now.
But they looked out my window, and I started to think with them, having them observe again, what shape this building would look like at night, what would happen at night. Of course, a lot of them did the Hollywood sign. You don't really see that outside my window. It's the next room down. But they can go look.
So they have a whole series of these little tiny collages, again, with different kinds of papers and buildings at night.
And then they would come in the next morning with stories about, "Oh, yeah, you're right, things are black at night, or dark, dark, dark blue." And so I have asked them to be an observer of their life around them at night.
Hook up with literature. It was the 100th birthday of Dr. Seuss. Read them a million Dr. Seuss stories, and they invented their own. It was fun. They're totally into that, of course.
Again, we have an icon for a tree. There are probably some of you in this room who, if asked to draw, say, "No, I can't draw, and I can't draw -- I can only draw a straight line." Or, "I can't even draw a straight line."
Or if your children or students have come to you and say, "Can you draw something," you'll draw a stick figure. We resort to that. But I think if I have made them really good observers, they can begin to see that that's not how the world really looks.
So we walked around, really talked about what real trees look like, and how they grow and they separate. In Los Angeles we've got a whole slew of different varieties of trees.
Then I said, "Now, let's make up your own." These two pieces of art were hanging in the La Cienega gallery. We have some galleries -- as part of the West Hollywood building permit, we had to be part of public art, so there are three open windows there, and I have to have them filled. And sometimes my projects take too long. I don't quite know what to fill them with. But these were there over the summer.
I said to the kids, "Will you let me borrow them? Because they're wonderful and so expressive."
And somebody wrote Reveta and wanted to buy them. Of course, we didn't sell them. But for my personal taste, I love this crazy one on the right. It's really wonderful.
Next one. Andy Goldsworthy inspired this piece. I spent 45 minutes at least looking through two Andy Goldsworthy books. If you're not familiar with this artist, he works only with elements of nature. Wood, ice, stones. He is about balancing. He's about impermanence. He celebrates the natural surroundings and he doesn't care at all that they will be destroyed by natural elements. There's a magnificent documentary that was a theatrical release, "Rivers and Tides." It was released two years ago. We have it in the school. And I find him a very passionate artist. He's an extraordinary man. To hear him talk about the process and the commitment.
And commitment is another thing. The fact that I can get 12-year-olds to work on a piece of art for three months. Our life is very fast now. The idea that I'm doing something that's very slow is counterintuitive, almost, but that's what it takes to be an artist, changing your mind, being flexible, seeing things differently, reorganizing it. Failure is such an important part of education. And God knows, I think we've run away from it. We need to fail. We need to not like our art.
No art goes home until after the art fair. I don't let them take it home. It's not a frivolous project. It's something they need to look at. And you learn from your mistakes. Why shouldn't they do it in art and reapply it somewhere else? The disciplines shouldn't be so not isolated.
So the children were fascinated by Andy Goldsworthy. They couldn't believe how he would get to balance. How do you bite icicles and lick your fingers and stick them together? They just kept asking me a million questions, and I said, "I wish he would come right here and answer them. I think he's terrific."
A neighbor had given me her whole backyard, when she moved away, which was full of wrapped-up vines. And I brought them into the art room and I was trying to think, how am I going to do this? This is really unwieldy. Where will I put them?
So I gave the kids a kind of pad to work on. I said, "We're going to make abstract shapes, and I'm going to man the hot glue gun, and you're going to twist, and we'll have wire and twigs, and we're going to do this and that. We're just going to line up and try to get these abstract shapes together. Then we're going to tie them together with twine."
One class created this kind of quilt, and another class did a more three-dimensional one, kind of a mobile thing that hung up. They're huge. This is six or eight feet across. Very big, and they don't transport very well.
Well, one morning I came in, and all my vines had been thrown out by our very attentive cleaning crew. Oh, my gosh. So I had to call nurseries in the neighborhood and say, "I'm an art teacher of elementary," you know, that whole line. "Do you have any vines?"
So I found someone, and he was so enchanted with the story and my dilemma -- we were right in the middle of the process -- he gave them to me. So I got great big vines. So that had a little history to it. And now that hangs in the resource room in the library. We gave it. This was another thing. We gave it to the school.
There shouldn't be anything so precious -- children have got to get over the fact that that art that they make is just theirs. If it's great, give it to the school, or give it to somebody. Let it be celebrated for a long time. We're trying to do more of this, so they understand that there's a permanence to what they have done.
We use art history a lot, too. I have always used art history and artists, but I got this off the Internet because this is what inspired this lesson. I do formal art history classes with them all the time so that they can talk about art. I ask them what they see in this, and it goes on and on. The more you get kids to practice that, they can. It's the kids whose parents say to me, "My kids hate going to museums except when you take them. They love going to museums with you."
Well, it's because I insist that they see something in the art. We talk about it. They must be language-connected to art. They must learn how to talk about it. It is not pretty, cool, ugly, or beautiful. It's something more than those four words. I ban those words from art history discussions. And I put up five prints of Picasso in all different styles. And I covered up the artist's name. So I asked them to, each one, go around, what do you see, what do you see, and it's sort of like a feeding frenzy. Once somebody steps in and is bold, the other person will step in and they'll talk and they'll talk.
And everyone knew right away that this kind of portrait that I have was Picasso. But they had no idea of the blue period, or the rose period, or the classical period, or anything else, or the collage, the three musicians that looks like a collage but it's painted cubist, were his. So we were talking and exploring. And then I said, they're all by Picasso. And that's one class.
Then in the next 45-minute class, I read them a book that's called, "Spending a Weekend with Picasso." It's from a series of books about artists, and it's written as if it was in the first person, and they're great. And it has the appropriate arrogant voice in there. "When I was 13, I could do realism, and my father gave me his brushes and I was great, and I threw out all the rules."
So the kids understand the complexity and how bold and brave and willing to just throw out all the rules and try something new and experiment. And they're quite enchanted by it.
I had a whole lot of paper meat trays that had been given to me, and I thought I would try to get them to discover or explore the idea of doing a fusion face, half with profile face, combined with full frontal view. It's amazing. I can take them on these journeys, and they don't balk at all. If I did this to my adults, I'm not sure what they could do. But they would struggle.
So here are the meat trays that were covered with gesso. They do rough drafts, and they think about frontal and side view.
They are now also hanging in the window. They had the option, if they wanted, to cut some out and make a negative space behind it.
They used acrylic paint and mixed their colors in a little palette, and they would stand in line waiting for me to dispense the acrylic paint. It all takes a while.
Then the final part of that assignment was that they realized how much harder it was to be Picasso creating this crazy face than just doing those biography faces that were just absent-looking. And they had suddenly a new level of respect for contemporary or modern art.
Contemporary art, which is now. This is Ed Ruscha. I took my fifth grade down to MOCA to see the Smithson show and Ed Ruscha's show. The docents at MOCA were fabulous. I think they spent more time with Smithson, and if you're not familiar with Smithson, essentially he's an earth artist. He did the spiral jetty and he's worked in the environment. He, too, like Andy Goldsworthy, works with natural materials, but also is a painter and film-maker.
In the museum there were piles of rocks in with glass and mirrors, and the docents had them sitting down, and if you could be a fly on the wall behind my students when we go to museums, it's wonderful, because they're completely excited about this. Somehow there is a seriousness to it. I think if they were less familiar with art -- the kids who come to school as students who have had no art, really are confounded. They don't have a vocabulary. They don't know what to ask and they don't know what to say.
But I decided I would try an Ed Ruscha assignment, and I really didn't know what I was going to do until that morning when I got in, I thought, Oh, my gosh. It was right before Christmas holiday.
And so I started out the class and I said, This is a time of the year where words are pretty cheap. We have greetings for everybody. We're asked to be consumers. There are messages that come across, no matter what persuasion, no matter what you believe, no matter what holiday you celebrate. There are some messages and things we could think about. So I want you to choose a word or phrases that resonate from your heart and give it to the new year.
So here's one. That was done by a boy. We used artist tape. I have never used artist tape with kids. These are fifth graders. They had to figure out what they're going to use, what kind of font, where they were going to place it. How can you be neat in chalk? So it was kind of an oxymoron with fifth graders. Chalk is the messiest thing in the world. This is chalk rubbed around there. You had to think of color association. Was your world going to be small, big? How are you going to do it?
So they did a rough draft. After the rough draft they came to me. I showed it to the kids. They decided. The kids took votes on it. This one reads better than that one, this one reads better than this one. No, I think you should use stencils. So the conversation dialogue, all day long, day after day, until they finally settled on what they're going to do.
"Please don't shoot." This one really does have a story attached to it. Does anybody want to venture a guess what sex did this? What do you think? Did a girl do it, or a boy? A girl did this. She came up to me and she first had the words horizontally, and so I said, "Have you tried it the other way around?"
So she tried it the other way around. And then she drew them on the board, and the class took a vote. They said, "No, no. Much better vertical. Much better vertical."
So there's the intuitive reaction to the artworks. Somehow it communicated and everybody said, "No, it works much better that way." Everybody, to a person, voted vertically.
Then you experiment with the font. Do you want small, all the same size? What are you going to do? Do you want to use stencils? So she came back to me about 15 minutes later and said, "I know what I want to do. I want the 'please' to be small, and then 'don't' is going to be in the middle, and the 'shoot' is going to be the largest. I think the 'please' should be small because nobody says 'Please' anymore."
Kind of a strange but interesting comment coming out of a fifth grader.
"Beyond." Interesting choice of putting that blue right there in that O.
"Terrorism." I think when we stereotype art, we think, Oh, boys are for war, and girls love flowers and hair-dos that go like this, and those dresses that none of us ever wear.
Like where did that come from? This is by a girl.
This is by a boy.
Now, there is a real stereotype. That is a boy's work of art, but really, the length of time he worked on this, "war" and "raw," and then just almost like making it like a flag and taking another material and making those smudge marks there. I think it's a real successful piece of art, and it says a lot.
There we have a girl's piece of art. Developmentally she's not quite the layered thinker that the other one was, and that's fine. She loves this. It's perfect.
Then we have this kid who did this twice, because the stripes got messed up. So he said, "I'm going to do it again." "It's black and white. Just think about it."
Diebenkorn was an artist -- last year, when we moved into our new building, my room was filled with windows, and the halls are filled with windows, and there's light everywhere. So I decided to take them and show them Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series, and this is when Diebenkorn, a California artist, walked from his home in Santa Monica, to his studio down in Venice, back and forth, back and forth. He abstracted the shapes of the city, the beach he saw, and it was a journey.
So I got out the whole book, spent 45 minutes -- again, if you were a visitor in my class that day, you would really wonder, what does she do in art? I had the book up, not saying anything about art, really, but thinking and preparing and planning and making them realize they have to say something.
So they got it, page by page. We looked at all the books about the Ocean Park series.
So then I sat in my art room on a stool and I looked at that tiny square window from across the room, and there is a black-and-pink rectangular marble building. It's got a few vertical lines on it, and I abstracted the shapes. I did it in charcoal on a big piece of paper.
I said, "Okay, go around the building. Find your view. Sit down and abstract what you see."
So I walked them down the hall, and I just verbally talked about it. What shape is the roof? What's the courtyard all about? You know, what do those buildings look like in the distance? And they suddenly got it. So on a piece of charcoal, they're very dutiful, they just go and do what I say. I'm always a little shocked. That's a hard thing to do.
So this is one, and then they could come back to my room after they got their shapes and they could color it any way they want.
There is another.
And this is another.
This actually is me turning the camera, looking down the industrial stairwell. I turned the camera for a reason I'll show you in a second. There is the industrial stair railing there, steps down there, going to one of the banks of windows in our stairwell on this brand-new building. So that is a view.
Now, the next piece is the art piece that came out of that. A fifth-grader. You know, he saw it so clearly and understood it so well. This is one of my favorite pieces of art. It's hanging up.
That one is, too.
These are two assignments I do the same every year. Sixth-grade masks. I believe that there should be some tradition, some culminating thing, that they should have something to look forward to. They start out at the beginning of the year, they put gauze strips masks on their face, and from that, they turn it into anything they want. They sit out there for three months being augmented and changed, and all the other classes come in and look at them and say, "I know what I'm going to do in sixth grade."
They're really excited that this will be their art project in sixth grade. So this started out as a face, and we have kids who choose to obliterate the face. And we have a car fanatic, and there's the front wheel of the car. You can see candy, crayon, some kind of martial arts character, and school supplies.
A cinnamon bun, a jester, a strawberry, a kind of cubistic die, Starburst. There's a face with a green tongue coming out of it.
Hamburger
There are the dots.
An ear of corn. I said to Ely, "Why? Why an ear of corn? What's that all about?" He said, "I don't know. I like corn." So that's his explanation.
A kid who plays the guitar, a kid who plays the saxophone, a child who loves to sing and has the starring role in "Once Upon A Mattress." Right down at the bottom you can see a little pea. See that? She got all that ticking and made her mattresses, and got a little dolly and stuck it on the top.
Okay. Conceptual artists. Who knows what the one on the right-hand side is? What is it right-hand one? There is a surfer there, surfing the web. Do you think it's a girl or a boy? It was a girl.
The second one you might not be able to read, but I couldn't help but put it in. It's an environmental statement about trashing our world. So there's everything in there. It's all appropriate, not inappropriate.
Candy, bubble gum.
There's the guitar again.
These are boys, definitely. Football, basketball, there's a glove, and we have a football player helmet.
We mustn't overread children's art. Two of the sweetest, most quiet boys I have. I thought, Oh, my God. This is really suicide bombing. This is bad. But I don't believe in censoring art.
When they do their clay figures, we have to have a long conversation about that, because when they do these little clay figures, the same class, I tell them right off the bat, "You have to remember who your audience is going to be at the art fair. Your grandparents, your teachers, your mothers and fathers. And if you can back up your statement that you have done a pregnant woman or a binge drinker," all of which we've had, "fine."
And I have gone to Reveta when there have been some particularly violent ones. She and I have agreed that if you're the artist and you can tell your grandmother why you have body parts floating all over this thing with blood and gore, okay.
So these two boys really surprised me. I thought, my God, this is the idea of suicide bombing. So I asked them, "Tell me about this, boys."
"Oh, it's Wile E. Coyote."
So don't over-read your art statements. But it's beautifully done, isn't it? They got this whole idea of pumping up that thing and exploding the face.
I'm just about to end. I want your questions. I'm ending in an ambiguous way. Right now, the fifth grade are working on a period of jazz collage about their lives with the music teacher. And I took the fourth grade to LACMA to see the "Renoir to Matisse" show and there was a huge Braque there.
And there were some Cezannes there.
I set up this still life in my art room. The assignment is to do a contour drawing, map it out. But are you going to be a cubist artist, or are you going to be an impressionist? So that's what we're in the process of now.
I didn't leave a whole lot of time for questions, but I would love to have your questions. And then I even had planned something to do, but I don't think we're going to have time. Is there anybody who would like to ask a question?
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: You must have a philosophy on how to deal with the exceptional artist as opposed to or in conjunction with the kids who aren't as good, in your opinion, or in the world's opinion. How do you keep them all going or encourage that less able job? For instance, I noticed you said a couple of times you took that piece. "Well, the giraffe is now outside of Reveta's office."
MS. LANDRETH: I didn't place it there and I don't choose those, either.
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: The classmates of the giraffe creator must look at it with awe, to some degree. Anyway, you get the point of my question.
MS. LANDRETH: I get the point. I think it's a good question. I think, for the most part, I have established a safe environment that nurtures every single one of the students who have had art as part of their language, so to speak, since kindergarten. They know, since we have a very diverse student body, that some kids have wonderful handwriting, and some kids have poor handwriting. Some kids are mathematicians. I think they're used to the variety of class configurations in every discipline, and I nurture them all.
I find something about each piece and I make a note in my class planning books. Everybody's artwork gets hung up on some bulletin board once a year. And when they come to me and say, "You never hang my artwork," I say, "I have," and I can go to my book and I can tell them, "I have hung your artwork this year."
Now, if they're not really observers, they haven't noticed, and I'll tell them that. They have to look around. You always have to look around.
So there are kids who are admired and the kids who still -- I fight realism tooth and nail. You haven't seen any renderings in this group, because realism is something teenagers go through, and they get that eraser and then they get judgmental, and then they never go back to the art room again. There are five kids who are great drawers. But I want them to speak from their hearts because really, art is so beyond that rendering.
So that's how I handle it, as best I can. The kids who are the least comfortable with art are the kids who come to the school in third grade or fifth grade, and then they watch this flurry of creativity and kids thinking and making marks, and they're a little bit lost. So I sit with them and help them talk it through and make them feel more comfortable. Because that's a big difference. Kids who have no art.
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Just a practical question. How often do you meet with your children, and for how many minutes a week?
MS. LANDRETH: I meet with each class in groups of 15, twice a week for 45 minutes.
Any other questions? Okay. Now, you have a beast in front of you. Do not look at it right side up. You're going to do a Betty Edwards exercise. Turn it upside down and I'm going to teach you verbally how to do a contour drawing.
Bring out a pen. If you don't have one, we have some extras. Do not use a pencil with an eraser. You are going to start somewhere. There is no one correct orientation. Start somewhere. Your eye is going to slowly travel along the exterior edge of the shape in front of you. The reason it's turned upside down is to help you not think about that, oh, my God, I'm on the ear, or the nose, or this looks terrible.
This is the first step I do with my adults in my adult class. Then they go from two-dimensional to actually doing a contour drawing of a watch, or a glass, or whatever.
You're going to go around very slowly and the paper -- turn it upside down -- is the same size as the paper you are drawing on. Okay? Your interior language will sound like, "Oh, I'm on a bump, I'm going right, I'm -- there's a little furry thing here." Try not to use words. Just kind of see this shape and the directionality in which your mark will go to mimic what you see in front of you.
You shouldn't talk about it. And I gave you all different animals, so you wouldn't be like the grownups and say, "Oh, mine looks worse than yours does," you know. Don't judge yourself. Just try it and see what happens. You have about five minutes or less.
It's a very slow, long line. It is not a sketch. You're just going to try to feel the shape through your drawing hand.
Now, I can tell by the titterings that you have almost finished. You probably worked about two minutes.
Turn your drawing, when you have finished, right side up. Turn your animal right side up. You will see that you have drawn the animal that I gave you. It's absolutely recognizable. If I had given you that right side up, a pencil, an eraser, you would have said, "I can't do this, and it's all wrong," but your animal should have a kind of personality. It's not supposed to be a photograph. You're supposed to be the artist observer.
Did anyone feel seasick doing this? I didn't see droves of you going to the bathroom, which could happen. Anyone feel horrible doing this? If you're really left-brain oriented, sometimes it does make you feel very uncomfortable and anxious.
Well, that's one of the tools I use in my art room. I so enjoyed being here. Thank you for having me. (Applause.)
MS. FORD: Thank you, Penny. That was wonderful. I think if we'd all had the opportunity to have been taught by you in elementary school, we'd probably all be doing things very differently from what we're doing now.
We're going to stop for a break now and reconvene at 10:30. Thank you.