This Wednesday we are kicking off our summer programming with a trip to the Florenceville Elementary School to teach the K’s - 5’s an art lesson. We’ve been brain storming ideas for a while, and feel a need to connect the artists that have been exhibiting at the gallery with our lesson plan for the elementary school. Darlene Teahen’s exhibition, Rejuvenation, has been on our minds the most. This idea of rejuvenating and reinventing objects that are insignificant or no longer have importance is highly interesting to us.
Darlene grows and studies sprouts, a minuscule plant organism that according to her and her husband the kids love to eat over any other veggie. In her larger than life paintings of these insignificant objects she uses brilliant colour tones to express her excitement with the idea of rejuvenation; that something so small as sprouts would often go unnoticed and seem unimportant, she uses the large size of the paintings to express how significant and amazing she feels these happenings are. She has even given the sprouts personalities through a sense of movement/ motion in her paintings. The sprouts have been reinvented into these vibrant personalities. Often times art can make you think about things that you’ve never thought about before. In this case Darlene uses her art to point out how amazing it is that life/ plants can go from something so small as a seed, into a whole plant.
With Darlene in mind we decided to look at other artists that have used rejuvenation in their art work as well. Just about every artist uses rejuvenation in some way in their work, but we found three artists that explored rejuvenation in different but similar ways.
Jacques Louise David explores ideas of rejuvenation in his portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon Crossing the Alps. Napoleon requested that David depict him riding this very muscular stallion across the alps giving the viewer the idea that Napoleon was this fearless man bravely set out to conquer, but in actual fact Napoleon was led by a guide across the alps mounted on a mule. Napoleon wanted to be remembered as this fearless entity instead of as a regular human being who has weaknesses, so he reinvented himself into this very masculine man. This is a form of rejuvenation. Napoleon was breathing new life into his image. He didn’t want to be seen as a weakling. The idea of rejuvenation was a very common process in that time for portraits. Just like we have airbrushing they just asked the artist to tweak a few things here and there.
Marcel Duchamp could be seen as the pioneer for creating recycled art. Recycling is a form of rejuvenation. Duchamp liked to question the idea of what is art, who says that this is art. He was very “anti-art.” Duchamp also began to explore the ideas of found art along side anti- art, and what flourished from this combination was his piece titled, Fountain. The “fountain” that he created was actually an old urinal that he found, but by taking this found object and creating a new use for it he was rejuvenating it, breathing new life into an old object. Bringing this piece of garbage back to life. Giving it new meaning.
Jane Elizabeth Perkings is a UK artist who uses found objects in her art as well, and assembles these objects into portrait mosaics of famous people. They are quite amazing in their accuracy. Her found objects usually consist of some form of plastic (forks, buttons, old toys). She is rejuvenating these objects, giving them new significance and value.
With these four artists in mind we decided the best way to get the ideas of rejuvenation across to the students was by getting them to build mosaics from every day insignificant objects. They will assemble these objects onto a printed image, but each student will put their own twist on these images. They will combine the objects and the image together to create a new and improved image. Even if several students pick the same image each image should come out marked by the students own individual interpretation. This is a person’s perspective, or their point of view, which means the way they look at it and what ideas it reminds them of. Art is great in that it offers a way for people to express their different views and create something visual about what is an important topic to them.
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