Objectives
A portraiture unit is particularly relevant for students in high school. Developmentally they are at a point that almost all of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are driven by the search for a personal identity. "Who am I?" "What am I capable of?" "What is my place in the world?" Making use of the range of characters available in English literature, from the noble to the despicable, can take us beyond our limited experience of life to show us the lives of other people at other times. These stories can stir us intellectually and emotionally, and deepen our understanding of our history, our society, and our own individual lives. It is through their characters that authors convey their insights into human nature. Using literature in visual arts classes in this context of self-discovery, I hope to help students make the connections to understanding themselves and others. Seeing such similarities can help us to understand and accept others.
For the purpose of this unit, students are going to be looking closely at the physical aspects of the muscles and how they change the contours of the face as they attempt to show different emotions clearly on the portraits of the various characters they create. In particular, students will be introduced to the work of the seventeenth-century French artist Charles LeBrun along with other historically significant portrait studies from artists such as Lenardo daVinci. Students will also be introduced to the work of a contemporary psychologist, Paul Ekman, whose international studies on human facial expressions are not only fascinating, but for the purpose of this unit, clearly outline the muscle movements in the face as they respond and react to various emotions.
The inevitable challenge in working with teenagers and visual images is to move beyond the trite. The tendency for cliché when responding to the questions about self is pretty universal. This of course is a difficult matter to discern. My response to the image of a young girl with a single tear rolling down her cheek towards a heart that has been torn in two is very different from that of my students. I dare not claim superiority or for that matter, haughtiness - quite the contrary. In David Bayles book, Art and Fear, I am reminded that "virtually all artists spend some of their time producing work that no one else much cares about. …the function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you about the small fraction of your artwork that soars." 1 The artist Paul McCarthy speaks to this idea as well in an interview from the PBS series, Art 21. As he puts it, "…the responsibility is to the work." No doubt, art making is hard. To be inspired, to create innovative marks on a page, and to confront personal censure are difficult challenges for artists and teachers alike. It is my hope that this unit provides students with options they may have otherwise not considered when it comes to creating portraits.
One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even failed works are essential. It is my intention that this unit will start on the first day of school. I am reminded before I begin, that though there may initially be times a which the work is seemingly less polished or developed, it will continue to gain strength, depth, and breadth as we move through the unit. Intrinsically, I am a not a product oriented teacher. Process, and the development of students' visual language through experimentation and invention, is my 'modus opperindi'!
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