by Teresa Christmas
“Architects may come and architects may go and never change your point of view. When I run dry, I stop awhile and think of you.”
That’s a line from a Paul Simon song, called So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright. I grew up hearing that song and now, finally, I understand it. Art Matters Community Studio and Gallery at 310 East Main Street is preparing for our seventh year of Summer Art Camps for children. I love this, because the summer camps inspire me to continue to learn about art history, and it is fun to come up with ways to involve children in activities that help them discover things about artists from the past and places around the world. Anyone who signs up for the Frank Lloyd Wright camp this summer will learn how the architect changed his point of view. Did you love to look at plans for houses and dream about your own house when you were a child? (Mine always had secret passageways.) Blueprints, tools that architects use, building blocks, geometric shapes and creating our own designs (both 3-D and on paper) are just some of the things that will keep us busy during the Frank Lloyd Wright camp!
Something special that I look forward to this summer are the guest artists who will join us at Art Matters! One of them is Lisa Kelton. When I taught art in a public school, Lisa was a teacher I worked with and admired. Some people really have a gift for teaching, and she makes learning exciting. Not everyone knows that Lisa has a background in art. She thought it would be fun to introduce children to Spinning and Weaving, so she is taking the lead on a camp that we will teach together this summer.
I am also super excited to welcome WKU art student Sunny Shepherd who will be helping each child who attends the Diego and Frida camp to make a fresco piece to take home! Buon fresco or “true” fresco is an ancient painting technique in which ground pigments are applied to wet plaster. During this camp, we will have an opportunity to learn about the many fresco murals Diego created in Mexico and in the United States. Sunny has studied under WKU art professor and fresco artist Mike Nichols, and we believe this activity will be a highlight of this art camp!
I never get tired of learning about India! There are always new things to discover about such an old civilization. Susan Tutino (Strawberry Fields Yoga,) will be our guest instructor for the Ancient Arts of India camp this year. She has just returned from yet another pilgrimage to India, and she will involve our young artists in doing yoga every day of our camp and even end the week with a kirtan (musical performance art) the whole family is welcome to attend.
I feel fortunate to say that I also get to work this summer with Diane Ramic, a freelance illustrator and character/creature designer with a background in graphic design, studio art and digital art. Diane has been working with children in a public school setting, and she seems excited about being a co-teacher in two favorite art camps at Art Matters: Vincent Van Gogh and also An Impression of France. Campers who attend either or both of these camps really get the downtown Bowling Green experience. Van Gogh and French Impressionists were known for painting en plein air, which means they set up their easels outside, hoping to capture the light in beautiful landscapes. Young artists will do this at Fountain Square Park, as Van Gogh did when he painted his Café Terrace at Night (which for us will be the nearby Spencer’s Coffee Courtyard in daylight.).
New this summer is our Art of the Caribbean camp! Who wouldn’t want to visit the Caribbean? When you cannot actually go, Art Matters brings places to you, through visual art, music, short film, and great children’s books. We even try foods from different places, which at this camp will include tostones and empanadas! Of course we will have a wide variety of art activities including painting in the style of traditional Haitian artists and identifying the petroglyphs left by the Taino people.
Art Matters will celebrate American art when we return to New Orleans this summer, but this time we are adding the Spanish and French architecture of this city, as well as its jazz musicians and some visual artists of the south. We will also visit a place and time in the Mod for Pop Art camp, when the epicenter of art moved from Paris to New York City during an art explosion of the 1960s! Last but not least, our own Kentucky will be celebrated in the Art HerStory camp. Our curriculum for this camp continues to evolve but began with funding from The Kentucky Foundation for Women. This camp is always about women artists, but this year, they are all Kentuckians!
Art is fun, but artists deserve to take a break and we do that quite often, because it is summer. Every camp spends time outdoors exploring some of the rich experiences that downtown has to offer including cooling off in the fountains of Circus Square Park and getting an occasional ice cream from Mary Jane’s Chocolates!
Lastly, we will continue with our tradition, which we call Art that Really Matters; four of our camps will donate 10% of all proceeds to charitable organizations. Picasso said, “Every child is an artist.” I would venture to say that there is also a child in every artist. Regardless of the mixed ages in each camp, differentiated learning takes place. Each artist makes choices and works at his or her own pace and level of ability. We celebrate the end of each camp with an art exhibit in the Art Matters Gallery that shows how unique we all are!
