Kete - Uruuru - Matua
In my Aboriginal Studies class at UNBC, two of my peers presented on New Zealand's Maori iwi (tribes). They were talking about the Maori Three Baskets of Knowledge and gave us a quick assignment to do. I don't remember how my basket was selected, but I received the Kete-Uruuru-Matua basket. This basket represents peace, goodness, and love and includes a portrait of the family. I was suppose to draw my representation of this.
Every time I am asked to do art such as drawing I cringe, just looking at my picture I am sure you can tell why. Just the day prior, I saw someone else's art work of an orange, and she told me it was grade one artwork. My comment to her was "Well I must be drawing at a pre-school level then."
In my mind I envisioned a dove (of course for love), and two different colored hands holding this dove and then the family standing behind the arms and dove.
I drew the picture this way because the dove represents love, the hands holding the dove represent goodness and caring, while the different colored hands represents my family and it's diverse make-up. We have Norwegian background and in the family we have Mexican, Aboriginal, and Japanese cultures that have joined my sisters family. When I drew the family portrait, I wanted to connect the arms to the family because this would show the unification, support and love in our family.
So enough embarrassment and here is my personal challenge. I am going to get a learn to draw book and teach myself how to draw through out this arts course. Near the end of the course I will re-draw this portrait in the same amount of time and post it here so that we can see if I have improved at all. Through out my lessons, I will log any drawings that I feel I should post and share my thoughts around them.
Feel free to pass along any words of encouragement as I learn over the next couple months.
Literature on learning to draw says that people stop learning when they stop drawing. I am guessing that you have not been drawing for a long time - maybe it wasn't even an important part of your childhood. So this challenge that you have set for yourself is quite amazing and even if you aren't happy with your drawings in the end, you will still learn a lot about the process and experience of learning to draw. There is a book you might like to look at - Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes. I see that you can get a paperback version for under $20 from Amazon or Books and Co. may have it or could order it for you. A retired professor named Bob Steele has been working very hard to get teachers to understand how drawing is an important part of child development - his website might be interesting to you, too. I think your first strategy might be to practice drawing with smooth, confident lines rather than sketchy lines. Don't be afraid to draw a line again if the first attempt doesn't go exactly where you want it to. And don't be too fussy - draw a line and move on. It is amazing, when we look at drawings done by the masters, how many lines are out of place but simply drawn over. You might want to try contour drawing - you can Google that to see what it is - but basically it is the technique of trying to have your eye and your hand follow a line, usually the outside edge of something you are looking at, at the same time. This strategy is often used in elementary or junior high schools - kids draw their thumb or their show and the detail is quite amazing. Contour drawing is a technique that helps people learn to notice detail.
ReplyDeleteOh, I forgot to mention how cool the context was in the art experience you described! The activity was useful, not so much for the finished product, but for the thinking that you did about culture and context and the meaning of these for your own family. Also, there are other ways to produce images than drawing. You could build something with objects (the dove, hands) to communicate your concept, or you could do a photo collage. Those other arts media would bring new possibilities to someone who is not confident with drawing. The real art is the concept, however it can be expressed visually.
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