By the time Vijay Balakrishnan starts the first grade he’ll know more about art than many high school students, not to mention many adults.
Vijay is in kindergarten at Geneva Day School. The school offers an art education program that begins with its youngest students, aged 3-4, then continues through pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. The youngest children and the pre-kindergarteners learn the elements of art and art vocabulary — cold colors, hot colors, shape, texture.
“By the time they reach kindergarten they’ve built up a vocabulary to describe what they observe,” said Barbara Korb, the director of the art program at the school.
On Saturday Vijay showed off one of his recent works, “Candyland With a Roller Coaster,” a clay sculpture with wires and reflective plastic pieces “to make it shiny,” Vijay said. His was just one of hundreds of pieces of art on display at the schools annual art show that shows off the works of the schools kindergarten students.
The theme of the show was “Art Through the Ages,” and exhibited the students’ art history education that took place over the last school year. From cavemen drawing on walls to Georges Seurat’s pointillism painting to Alexander Calder’s modern mobiles, the children learned about the techniques that have produced the wide variety of art over human history and then tried it out for themselves.
When the students made their cave drawings, they produced their own paint — really more of a colored paste, Korb said — from eggs, berries, rocks, water and oil.
TO SIMULATE the iconic works of Jackson Pollock, the kindergarteners donned plastic smocks and stood before a canvas stretched before them on the ground with paint-filled ketchup bottles in hand. Then they went to work.
Haydn Gwyn’s favorite part was “that we threw the paint.” The Pollock piece is a parent favorite every year, Korb said.
Among other artists and art styles that the children have learned about in the last year were Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Greek and Roman art, Michelangelo, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Georgia O’Keefe and Native American art like sand drawings, spirit beads and dream catchers.
To simulate Michelangelo’s experience painting the Sistine Chapel, Korb taped construction paper to the bottom of desks. The children — on their backs beneath the tables — then painted away.
The students do their art work with all of the teachers at the school. The teachers spend countless hours framing the students’ works that will be displayed at the show each year, Korb said.
Korb has been teaching art for 20 years, and has been at Geneva Day for the last 10. The goal of the program goes beyond just exposing the children to art. Korb wants the children to learn how to form their own ideas and thoughts and to become confident in expressing those thoughts.
The children learn about an artist or an art technique, and then make it their own.
“The freedom is theirs to express it however they want to interpret it,” Korb said. “We give the kids total freedom; individuality is what we really aim for. No two pieces look alike because the kids have the freedom to do what they like.”