A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of Alfred University
Somewhere Between Wonder and Innocence
by
Kelcy Beckstrom
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the Alfred University Honors Program
November 16th, 2020
My honors thesis allowed me to join the two things most important to me in my life: art and teaching. Making this body of work encapsulated everything I hoped to gain from my college experience; I had been waiting for a chance to truly combine my major and minor.
Previously I believed that the only way I would be able to do that is to have my senior Bachelor of Fine Arts Thesis show, and then do my honors thesis on something in the education field.
Luckily, I was able to combine the two in a single gallery show.
The creation of the show and the body of work in it begins at the start of my senior year.
I had a breakthrough in the process in which I make art, through unfortunate and truly
heartbreaking circumstances. Three weeks before my senior year began, my mom passed away unexpectedly. I didn't even know if I was going to come back to school that fall. I believed that I was too weak…that I didn't have the will to continue on with my normal life. When that
semester began my mind was on much "bigger," more emotional things than painting, I was grieving.
This return to making art and the feeling of hope returning to the world became a new start to this project. This caused me to see art in a completely new way, and I felt as though I didn't have anything to lose. I had already lost one of the most important people in my life, so who cares if this painting comes out poorly? What does it matter if this color choice doesn't work perfectly? Put simply, the loss of my mother gave me freedom within my art practice by teaching me how impermanent everything in life is. If I mess up a painting, I can fix it. If my color choice, my composition, or any other technical part of my painting is "wrong" or “bad" or
"ugly," it can all be fixed.
This epiphany within my painting practice was the first step toward this final project and body of work. The second step was my newly adopted painting practice of making work on found paintings or my own paintings from previous semesters that I no longer cared for. This practice came about from the sheer exhaustion I was experiencing mentally from grief. That mental exhaustion led to physical exhaustion, and I allowed myself the leniency to say that it was okay if I didn't have the energy to make myself new canvases. Using found canvases also gave me something to begin with, and it influenced and inspired the paintings that were put on top.
At the time this new practice of experimentation was happening, I was working as a preschool teacher and noticed that my students' drawings and paintings were exactly the type of under paintings that I wanted to work on top of. That is when the realization came to me that I could do a single project that included everything I wanted it to. I would have my preschoolers start my paintings, and then I would complete them.
There were logistically a few hoops I had to get through before I could start painting.
That was probably my first “introduction” into the education system for this project. The first thing I had to do was create permission slips to get parental permission for the preschoolers to participate, for me to take photos documenting the process, as well as permission to list their name as an artist in the show. Once I got enough of these slips back with signatures and had canvases ready to be worked on, we were able to get to work.
When the kids had some extra work or play time, I pulled five of them from the
classroom at a time to cover a four- by five-foot canvas. To prep for this, I had five paint colors mixed for them. The process of choosing these colors proved to be more difficult than
anticipated. Color theory proved to be more necessary than ever, as I had to attempt to give the students colors where even if every single one of them got mixed together on the canvas, it wouldn't become a muddy, brown mess. For many of these base paintings, I looked to some of my own favorite paintings' color palettes for inspiration. In the beginning when I was trying to figure out this process, this way of finding color palettes was immensely helpful. As I became more familiar with the process of choosing colors, I trusted myself to create my own color palettes.
The actual painting process with the kids was even more fun and inspiring than I could have ever imagined. Not only did their unconscious creativity create beautiful, abstract paintings, but the sheer happiness and excitement that they displayed while making these paintings helped to renew my own love for making art. Since the canvases were so much bigger than they were, the kids thought that this project was quite literally larger than life. Their gasps when they see the large canvas ready on the floor, their handprints in the paint as they try to reach the middle of the canvas, and their excited smiles when I have them step back and see the painting once it's complete made this project worthwhile on its own.
After getting three paintings done with the preschoolers, the unthinkable happened to the world. After the shock of the coronavirus pandemic radiated to our small college town and school officially closed down for the semester, the problem of how to continue or complete this project without my studio, my materials, and, most importantly, my preschoolers, arose. To continue making work and in hope that the kids would be returning to school in a fairly short amount of time (spoiler alert: it would be almost five months until they returned), I bought some small ten by ten-inch canvases and five-packs of brushes to deliver to the kid's houses if
their parents were willing to have them continue to make art with me. Although my intentions were good, this translation of the project that I had begun pre-pandemic didn’t work as
intended. I underestimated the effect that quarantine and isolation would have on me and my work ethic as a whole. After delivering the "art packs" to the homes of students who wanted to continue to participate, it was difficult to find the motivation and energy to make work myself, let alone drive across the expansive local area to each student’s house to pick up or drop off work. The significance of this pandemic on the world was unparalleled to anything anyone in my generation had experienced. It felt like all hope was lost and like it was pointless to continue to work when the future was so uncertain.
Mental illness ended up taking over my life, as it did many others in the world, during this time. Without going into much detail, it ended up being months before I returned to my makeshift studio in my dad's office. When I finally did return, it was after months of going back to counseling and a new medication regimen. Looking back on that return to the studio, I believe that time away helped me to look at my work from an outside perspective. This was a perspective similar to that I had felt at the beginning of the school year after the loss of my mom, and I was able to objectively assess what needed to be done to the works I had there.
The next phase of this project was a whirlwind. Soon after I returned to the studio, I began my student teaching experience in an elementary art classroom. This was another environment in which I knew I could continue this project, although I was now on a tight timeline. My first day of school was less than a month before I was scheduled to begin setting up my show to display this body of work. While I was extremely focused and “in-the-zone”
while making work for this show, this month of teaching, learning, painting, and repeat was incredibly stressful.
Being in an elementary classroom also gave me the opportunity to work with a wider breadth of ages, so I was able to observe, interpret, react, and pull inspiration from the ways in which a preschooler makes marks on a canvas as compared to a sixth grader. Contrary to what I expected, the preschoolers actually created more interesting, cohesive paintings than the older students did. I believe that this is due to the fact that as three- and four-year-olds, they haven't yet learned to think about each brush stroke they make, while as students get older they begin to compare their work to their peers, and become self-conscious of their art.
The preschool students are three and four-years old, putting them in the scribble and pre-schematic stages of artistic development. The scribble stage is typically found in children aged one to three, and they are engaged more so in the “physical activity of drawing," not so much the mental, emotional, or thoughtful stages of art making. Students in the pre-schematic stage, typically found in children ages three and four, are "beginning to see connections
between the shapes that they draw and the physical world around them (Roland, 2006)." The students who painted with me were all firmly in these two stages, displayed in their messy brush strokes and lack of "realistic" content.
The five-year-old kindergartners are typically in the schematic stage. In this stage, children will have assigned shapes to objects they are trying to communicate. They have a
"defined order in the development of their drawing [or painting] (Roland, 2006).” The kindergartners I worked with clearly felt that they were, in a way, breaking rules when I explained to them that we were only using lines, shapes, and patterns to cover the canvas. I
had to encourage and remind them that we weren't supposed to be painting anything specific.
Students in the schematic phase typically prefer "clear separation" in their artwork, so painting up next to and even over top of their peer's work was out of their comfort zone (Roland, 2006).
Differences between preschool and kindergarten classes versus the fourth and sixth graders in the paintings themselves are significant. The younger classes create fewer concrete shapes, patterns, and lines. They are much more focused on covering as much of the canvas as they can as quickly as they can. Meanwhile, the older students paint more shapes and lines within their canvas. They pay attention to what their peers are doing, think about how they can react or add to what they see being put onto the canvas, and then put their paintbrush down to begin painting. The mental processing is drastically different between the older and younger age groups.
The fourth-grade students were mostly in the dawning realism stage of artistic
development. In this stage, students are "becoming more critical of their own work” and, even though structure is Important within their work, it isn't enough (Roland, 2006). Students at this age strive for a more complex art piece, often incorporating overlapping shapes and structures with a sense of spacial relationships becoming more evident. While painting, their artistic development stage explains why it wasn't difficult for students to overlap their work with their peer's, but there was more think time and hesitation before the brush was put to canvas.
Some fourth graders and all sixth graders were in the pseudo-naturalistic stage of artistic development. At this stage, students are "very critical of their own success", which is determined by the level of realism they achieve in their work (Roland, 2006). This causes frustration when they are unable to reach the level of realism they hope to achieve. A few
fourth graders were obviously in this stage, as some asked if they could paint something real even after I explained that we were working abstractly. For sixth grade specifically, I also had to explain explicitly what abstract meant multiple times, and emphasize that we were only using line, shape, pattern, and color in the painting we were making together. This again displays that they were firmly in the pseudo-naturalistic stage of artistic development.
I also worked with multiple adaptive art classes, which had a much wider range of stages of artistic development than the other classes did. This greatly effected both how the students worked together as well as how I instructed them. In a third through sixth grade adaptive class, the students ranged between the schematic and dawning realism stages. As third through sixth graders, they were slightly behind where "typical" students of their ages are at, but not
drastically. For this class, the "chunking" and repetition of objectives and directions was all they needed to create their painting together. There was the widest range of marks and techniques used to finish their painting, which makes sense with the wider stage range of this group.
The other group of adaptive students was a pair of children with more significant developmental delays. Both students were in the scribble stage of artistic development, and needed both physical assistance and verbal reminders of our goals and directions. They, as the preschoolers did, created fantastic marks on their canvases, and made for a beautiful
background for me to work on top of.
As I progressed throughout this body of work, the work the students created remained creative, new, and exciting. My work that I made on top of theirs became increasingly difficult to conceptualize and create. Because of the tight time frame though, I didn't have any choice but to work through the difficult art blocks. I planned first and foremost the color that each
painting needed, and then I focused on placing structure and order within the composition. The hardest decisions ended up being what to cover and what to leave of the student's work. I tried to get rid of any areas that are super "muddy" in color (meaning the colors are all overly-mixed together and become a flat, dull brown). There were also areas in certain paintings where there was a lot going on compositionally, so it was also important to me that I calmed down those areas as well. Other than those couple of rules that were followed for almost all paintings, for the most part I allowed myself the freedom that I noticed in the younger painters I worked with. The preschooler's freedom to create free of judgement, fear, worry, and failure is what I craved in my own painting practice. Their fearless lines, their brave mark-making techniques, and even their physical enthusiasm and excitement to be making work was exactly what I wanted to see within my paintings and painting practice. I tried to give myself the allowance to simply do what felt right and take inspiration from wherever I found it, whether that be from the student’s interpretations of the painting they made, from nature, or from my surroundings.
One of the most difficult mental obstacles that I faced when creating this body of work was the idea of ownership, collaboration, and chance. Since I wasn’t the only artist putting marks onto the canvas, it was difficult for me to be making these works to be displayed in a solo show. This mental struggle came, of course, because it isn’t truly a solo show. Without the help of the kids I collaborated with, the show wouldn’t and couldn’t exist. It felt wrong to be curating my own “solo” show when the art wasn’t made by me alone.
I still struggled with these ideas even though we can find examples of artists claiming ownership of work they didn’t create alone. One of the most famous cases of this is artist Sol Lewitt. Lewitt is arguably most famous for his wall drawings, in which he created the
instructions and parameters for an artwork, and it was completed by contractors, curators, and today, could even be completed by students or anybody else who wants to (National Gallery of Art). Because he created the instructions for these wall drawings, his artwork can be executed by anyone, yet it is still known as a Sol Lewitt drawing. Even after his death, his drawings can still be created and a new Sol Lewitt drawing can come into existence.
Another artist who utilized assistants in his work is Bernard Frize. His abstract paintings follow strict rules, require two assistants, large brushes, and limited color palettes (ArtNet).
Frize is only one of three people working on the artwork, yet his instructions for the assistants, and his color and brush choices determine what the painting ends up looking like, when it is completed, etcetera. Although he didn’t create the artwork alone, it is still his vision and his way of executing the art that makes it his.
Lastly is artist and composer John Cage. Working with music, unconventional
instruments, and found sounds and noises, Cage relied on chance to create his performative pieces. His most famous work, “4’33”” consists of someone sitting down in a gallery, concert hall, or elsewhere. The audience is expecting them to play music, but the person sits silent, forcing them to listen. Cage says “there’s no such thing as silence (The New Yorker).” Hearing the wind outside, raindrops falling, people murmuring, all create a composition of noise,
created by chance and never the same twice. This chance forces Cage to release all control over what his compositions sound like. Relying on different settings, audiences, and performers means that he will never be able to create the same performance or composition twice.
All of these artists relate to and inspire the work created for this project. My student collaborators do the entire under painting for the works, and what they create is determined by
the instructions I give them. Since we are in a classroom setting, these instructions directly determine how they fill in the canvas in front of them. The student collaborators are also
“assistants” in the creation of these artworks, helping me to create the work. These assistants are following my directions, using the materials and colors given to them to create the work on the canvas that I prepped for them. This is the choreography of the work that the students are creating. Lastly, working with the students means that there is always chance involved.
Although I gave directions, depending on the age of the students I am working with, it isn’t guaranteed that those are always followed.
My goal was for the students to experience the feeling of seeing their work, something they contributed to, in a gallery. I wanted them to see that their work, even as a preschooler, kindergartener, fourth or sixth grader, was worthy and beautiful enough to be in a gallery, hung up on a white wall, lit up professionally, and taking up space in all it's colorful glory. Again, COVID-19 taking over the world effected this goal for the project, so I had to problem solve.
After reaching out to administration at the school I was student teaching at, I was able to work out a time for my superintendent to join me at the gallery to live stream a virtual gallery tour.
This was streamed on multiple social media platforms, allowing many students and families access to view it along with faculty and staff who had interest in the project. Although it isn't, of course, exactly what I had envisioned when thinking about how the students would see the work they helped to create, it was pretty much on-par with how the creation of the body of work came about amidst a pandemic.
Overall, this project and body of work was an act of perseverance. Through grief, the stress of senior year, a global pandemic, and mental illness, these paintings still came into
existence. Despite all of the completely unpredictable, insane obstacles thrown at me and the world, art still came out on the other side of it. Kids were still able to come together, smile, laugh, and paint together. When I think about the literal blood, sweat, and tears shed to allow the gallery show to happen, that fact alone makes me grateful for the opportunity to have create this body of work. In the education field, for the short amount of time that I have been in it, I have already experienced the feeling of absolute adoration for the students I have had the privilege of sharing the classroom with. They taught me and showed me that, even in the lowest, darkest parts of life, art can and will always come out on the other side of it.
Works Cited
“Bernard Frize.” Artnet, www.artnet.com/artists/bernard-frize/.
National Gallery of Art - Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing#65,
web.archive.org/web/20111008062240/www.nga.gov/exhibitions/lewittinfo.shtm.
Roland, Craig. “Young in Art: A Developmental Look at Child Art.” PDF Free Download, docplayer.net/18693054-Young-in-art-a-developmental-look-at-child-art-craig-roland- 1990-2006-www-artjunction-org.html.
Ross, Alex. “Searching for Silence.” The New Yorker,
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/searching-for-silence.
