Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Water artists - Children's art diary

Water artists - Children's art diary - art project
Arts & Activities, June, 2003 by George Szekely

Pools and tubs are natural spaces for children's experiments and water is,a naturally creative media. In water-play, painting, design, animation and sculpture inventions flow together. Sponge and cup cities ride tinted waves of bubbles, floating past plastic blocks.

Memories stronger than any color-wheel lecture can be experienced in water. Play dyes create a sea of color changes from yellow to bright orange, and then deep purple. River pilots skillfully navigate shaving cream icebergs with boats constructed over a variety of "floatable" finds.

Children collect all kinds of plastic coolers and storage containers for our art class; the items are reminiscent of bathtub shapes. Sitting next to these small-scale tubs, children create water plays inside them. Yes, we have rubber duckies and the latest in tub toys. I also curate the world's most unusual sponge collection and a selection of handsome shampoo bottles. All are willing to get wet and act as kids' stunt doubles in the water. In a comfortable environment, we reminisce with children about their water art and recall scenes and events played out. For most children, this is the first time water-play memories are referred to as something significant and talked about as art.

CABANA SWIM CLUB Several striped umbrellas surround the raised, kidney-shaped pool. Nearby, a pink, heart-shaped pool accommodates playful bathers and tiny pool toys. A yellow cabana flanks a blue pool and inside are all kinds of bubble blowers and pouring apparatus. Welcome to the strangest pool club in the world, a layout of different kinds of Barbie pools designed during the past 25 years. Play pools for toys are favorites for water play at home.

Memories of the beach and poolside can last all year as children replay them in the house. With floats, kick boards, balls, swim rings, water-noodles, watering cans, fins and goggles; children improvise pool games and adventures. Many free and creative water-play moments become a great resource for small-scale pool creations.

I travel everywhere with pools of all sizes sticking out from the trunk of my car. Some are hard plastic play pools, others are inflatable, and many are doll-sized. All are ready to set up in schoolrooms, hallways or backyards. Just the sight of play pools--seemingly out of place in a school--have an instant attraction to children. They symbolically import fun and instantly transport kids into a non-school frame of mind. When pools are set out on a school floor, they are often framed by towels from my collection of boldly patterned beach-towel art.

Masterpieces of contemporary beach floats are inflated, creating an instant gallery of imaginative soft sculptures. Art classes sit around the pool recalling beach plays, designing their own towel classics, floats, inflatable beach chairs and radios. Students design pools and water parks, choreograph the first-ever water circus and prepare for the ribbon-cutting ceremony to their own boat show. Students learn to view the water as an artist's flexible canvas and, as canvases often do, different shapes and sizes of pools inspire different artworks.

ALFONSO AND UNDERWATER STUDIES When Alfonso the goldfish came to live with us, his tank was richly furnished and decorated from the center to its glass-wall exterior. His days were exciting because my daughter, Ana,, constantly fabricated new landscapes and playgrounds for him to explore. That's probably why he lived for centuries in fish years, enjoying an artistic nurturing.

When Alfonso finally died, his tank was willed to Yertle the turtle. Yertle lived on the magnificent Riviera, a beach scene lovingly constructed especially for him. Ana kept excavating new rocks and finding different ways to terrace the turtle apartment. Presently, the aquarium, with only great memories and stories of its previous occupants, resides in my art class. It is still being cared for and decorated for future environments envisioned by children.

Inside our plastic aquariums made of soda bottles and acrylic sweater-storage boxes, deep underwater worlds are modeled. Our art class prepares for the dive by making cardboard scuba gear. We fish in secret waters deep below our art room, gathering only the rarest of sea creatures for their new tank home. Creating in underwater settings brings a new level of interest to experienced water players. We create model aquariums, propose underwater communities, and draw on wet sketchbooks made from reusable paper towels. Underwater studies are a new take on landscape art, a fresh look at color, texture, and the incredible sculptural forms of sea life and the design of equipment used to study it. In these explorations, children learn that art is often created in containers, that designing and furnishing environments above and below the water can be an artistic challenge.

BRIGHTON MEMORIES As a child, I only saw pictures of the ocean, but it stirred my curiosity. How lucky I felt to come to America and to settle in Brooklyn, near the beach. We arrived during the off season and my first American friend Dennis Chalkin and I spent all our spare time on the beach. We met up with old prospectors with metal detectors, but we hunted our own treasures. Not at all like the oceans in my pictures, Brighton Beach was one big trash pile. But, kids appreciate a good trash site, and we built wonderful things in its praise.

ach day yielded new objects to be freed from the sand, to pocket or to use in constructing our beachfront homes and sea-faring rafts. We built scores of watercrafts and sailed them with poetic communications to unknown shores. No writing tools were necessary, everything was there, waiting to be discovered and used for some creative purpose. Now a world-renowned photographer, when Dennis and I get together, to this day we always speak of the ocean studio we shared. The Brighton Beach sandbox and water shaped our artistic lives.

If you entered our class this week, you would think the janitors were on strike. Four play pools in our room are surrounded by trash, like finds blown over lime from Brighton Beach. Inviting children to my childhood required a dumpster to be unleashed. The water in the pools was colored to resemble murky Atlantic water, and as the children walked in, they were as excited about the trash and the prospect of floor shopping as Dennis and I used to be. There was plenty of great stuff to walk through, to pocket and trade. There was no glue, tape or staplers, but children proved again that they could construct fabulous structures, as we did, without them.

The canvas of the water was tested by arrangements of leaves to complex floating gardens using outside finds. For a grand finale, the children enjoyed witnessing the art history of American toy boats from my collection launched one by one on newly designed oceans. The children learned that the outdoors could be their best art-supply store. They learned that their many creative plays outdoors are an art form, and that art does not live on art paper, that it is important to go outside, travel, explore and be a part of the adventures that yield art ideas and resources.

WATER PLAY IS BASIC ART Water playing is children's earliest and often most memorable lesson in painting. In water plays, children learn to move liquids freely, to see it flow, to experience its bounce, to feel the pouring. Watercolor and related painting arts depend on the freedom and skill to move water and color over a surface. Water plays are rehearsals with liquids squirting, soaking and releasing from different containers or moving through funnels, across spoons, or in concert with different tools. Paint in the hands of an experienced water player is alive, maintaining its lively dances and playful moves. Think of all the innovations in painting in contemporary art and how they were shaped by water plays.

Some of the most important sculptural experiences start in water playing. Children playfully test forms in water and sense their weight, balance, buoyancy and other special qualities. In water games, children learn to set up elaborate scenes and give a variety of roles and meanings to found objects. In water play, children discover their own building blocks and sculpture materials. Water players discover the sculptural contributions of nature and the use of light, air and water in art. Through water play, children learn to enjoy moments in a private studio and the joy of conducting one's own discovery experiences.

Professor George Szekely is Area Head and Senior Professor of Art Education at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and is on the Arts & Activities Editorial Advisory Board.

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