Visual Arts
Art from Your Core
This book guides artists through the discovery and development of the art that they alone were born to create. Through real-life examples and exercises we tear down the cultural educational and psychological obstacles to finding authentic visual voice stripping away years of assumptions external and self-imposed limiting parameters.
We learn how to listen to the Universe and get out of the way when work wants to come through us. We construct a core foundation unique to each artist one that will grow along with them in their artistic
practice. Artists will discover their own singular visual vocabulary by mining their personal history psyche and world view to reveal new creative directions and learn how to intensify and develop their core ideas to make them more resonant and complex. We explore methodologies to tap into the subconscious cultivate breakthroughs create environments to maximize the gestation of ideas instill bravery and do meaningful research to produce deeply layered works of art.
While designed for college students professional artists will also find it allows them to get to that illusive
“next level” in their work; the one that calls to them haunts them in their dreams yet remains unarticulated in their practice.
In addition to helping undergraduate and graduate students who are looking to identify articulate and hone their vocabulary it can serve as a tool for more established artists to step up or refresh their practice. It is the kind of book that artists will keep on the studio shelf to pick up time and time again as their responses to the exercises will change throughout the course of their career.
There are extensive lists exercises and questionnaires anecdotes of art-historically significant artists and detailed descriptions of the methodologies they employ to tap into the subconscious various types of research on creative breakthroughs (and how to apply it to your own process) helpful suggestions to create an environment / lifestyle to maximize the gestation of ideas and how to do meaningful research to produce deeply layered works of art. While the tone of the book is often earnest and spiritual (in an “art is religion” kind of way) Kretz is aiming for a straightforward accessible kind-but-no-nonsense tenor with some humor and nurturing “tough love” when needed to say some of the things that artists need to hear but few people have the guts to tell them.
Reclaiming the Street: The Expanded Garden
The current model of urbanisation has blurred any line between cities and natural spaces. It has created a continuum that expands from the city centre to infinity. This denies urban dwellers access to nature affecting their health and wellbeing. In response artists have invented strategies to depict these areas and make them more friendly and habitable. This article presents the work of Lara Almarcegui and Xavier Ribas about resistance strategies on the outskirts of big European cities along with my own The Expanded Garden (2017) a moving image installation that reflects on the contact with nature of those living on the periphery.
Promises and Delivery: Teacher Education for ESD-Enhanced Visual Arts Education
Education for Sustainable Development can enable Visual Arts Education to approach challenging socioeconomic cultural and environmental real-life issues that twenty-firstcentury humankind needs to address through a fruitful input of context content and pedagogies with implications for teachers' roles and the education they receive.
This chapter discusses teacher education and professional development models and approaches that ESD can impart to VAE and how these are situated within the reconstructive postmodernist approach of art education. We discuss how the transformative character of ESD offers a learning context in VAE apt for adult learners and responds to the need for new collaborative learning spaces. We address ESD competences that enable educators to enhance VAE and propose a fourlevel professional development framework for teachers which is discussed with respect to the three Professional Development models for ESD teachers. The framework aspires to trigger discussion about emerging implications of transformative competence-based VAE in teacher education.
Lyric Convergences: Bringing Together Art, Philosophy and Places We Can Love
This chapter assumes that educational responses to issues of our times will require alternative pedagogies and new research methodologies. Mainstream education that relies on human logic and linguistics cannot adequately respond to needs of learners with life-experiences feeling bodies and emotions. I draw on Jan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy to illustrate this claim through juxtaposition of written text and photographic art to create lyric arguments. Photographs were crafted by two young participants and me during a canoeing journey. Written expression was derived from participant reflections of experiences while making photographs and my own reflections of lyric philosophy in practice. This experiment aimed to see what learning might arise from a place when controlling influences of logic and linguistics were loosened. This experiment also constitutes resistance to educational trends weighted in favour of analytical rationalistic and abstract versions of a living world–versions that alienate us from places we can love.
Participatory Art With Trees: A Pedagogical Approach
The study combined research in participatory art transformative education and Arctic arts. The research aimed to enhance communication with nature and general nature connectedness and wellbeing. An art workshop and participatory installation were designed to foster dialogue between human subjects and powers of nature using various artistic and bodily exercises. Following the principles of arts-based research it was enhanced through documentary photographs and participants' reflections. Findings indicate that expanding dialogue and sense of community between humans and powers of nature provides a sense of integrity. The value and potential implications of contemporary art discussed in this article are associated with informal education: facilitating healing and creating an opportunity for including other-than-human into sense of community.
Inviting Teacher Candidates in Art Education to Become Global Agents for Sustainability
This chapter presents an international arts-based project that empowers teacher candidates to become proactive contributors to sustainable development. This approach was developed through a collaboration with two undergraduate classes at Concordia University Canada and Hiroshima University Japan in 2021. It features collaborative online work to create a vision statement for advancing the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and explores the potential of artistic practices to facilitate teacher candidates becoming oriented toward social activism and in thinking and acting as global agents. The effectiveness and challenges of implementing this approach were demonstrated through case study research with the participating teacher candidates. The case study indicated that the approach is constructive for teacher candidates in terms of gaining opportunities for interaction beyond geographical borders as well as experiencing successful international collaborations that promote transforming their educational perspectives in becoming global agents.
The TWO|FOUR|TWO Art Group: Can Contemporary Art Practice Act as a Vehicle for Sustainable Development?
This chapter revolves around the role of contemporary art and its significance for the art world as well as the general social sphere with a special emphasis on the artistic processes and practices of the TWO|FOUR|TWO art group. The TWO|FOUR|TWO art group uses appropriation and anagrammatism to transmit concepts about consumerism greed and megalomania. The group's oeuvre relates to several of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals especially those which deal with ‘Zero Poverty’ (SDG1) ‘Good Health and Well-Being’ (SDG3) ‘Decent Work and Economic Growth’ (SDG8) and ‘Reduced Inequalities’ (SDG10). Within the chapter the focus is on the artistic practice of the art group with an emphasis on the integration of the art works and the ecological humanitarian and sociological dimension.
Changing Climate, Changing Communities
Sustainability education struggles from the public's disengagement with catastrophic environmental problems such as climate change. Recognising the power of art to engage the public with difficult topics we connected communities of learners through a community-based climate change exhibition in a small Midwestern US town using the CALL to action identified by Lawton Walker and Green (2019). We organised a community art exhibition as the instrument for catalysing artwork conversations and engagement among local school districts a university lifelong learners artists and environmental organisations. Both iterations of the art exhibition (2019 2020) attracted 100+ submissions from community members. The public reception event combined 10+ area environmental organisations engaged with sustainability and climate change issues including an artist talk that brought university students into the community art space. Place-based community art exhibitions that allow various learning communities to dialogue on critical environmental issues have potential to increase environmental engagement of diverse audiences.
An Aesthoecological Approach to Professional Learning Communities: Analyzing With CARE
In this chapter we explain the educational theory of aesthoecology (Turner 2019) and its relevance and usefulness to supporting the development of professional learning communities (Hord 1997). Aesthoecology can be described as an ‘ontoepistemology’ that fuses a theory of being with a theory of knowledge and deals with the affective connected and temporal aspects of education. While the aesthetic aspect of aesthoecology – appearance and feelings/sensation – concerns the affective domain the ecological aspect – spaces places and relationships – concerns connectedness. We use the example of the professional learning communities fostered in the Visual arts education in new times: Connecting Art with REal Life issues (CARE) Erasmus+ research project which brings together academics trainee teachers teachers and artists in exploring education for sustainable development (ESD) through visual arts education (VAE) in primary schools. Our argument is that aesthoecology offers a rich language with which to articulate shared values and goals in these communities.