Art Work from Art Farm

I'm just now starting to sift through three-years worth of student art work with the daunting task of trying to choose what to put on my website gallery. I've photographed so many images. The work posted there will eventually represents a range of ages from students entering second-grade through middle school.

Seen here is a lovely charcoal rendering of a horse by a second-grader. Students at Art Farm work from live animal models in outdoor studios on our 10-acre reserve. By the time this student rendered this horse, she had spent studio time learning how to use charcoal media and studying some basic horse anatomy. Her class was shown a diagram of a horse skeleton, and we went over how the horse moves and why. We watched a short film clip showing a horse in motion, and another illustrating how artists through the ages have depicted horses.

By the time we brought in a live horse to draw, this student was well prepared to tackle her subject. One obstacle to overcome when drawing a live animal is that animal models tend to move. That is why having a good sense of how the animal is put together to begin with helps in the drawing of it.

In our studio classes at Art Farm, students work at special easels called "art horses" (familiar to anyone who has ever gone to an art college or university) which allow them to sit down while drawing from a model. The art horse also allows them to draw at a tilt with a good range of arm and hand motion while closely observing the model. This is incredibly important for many types of drawing.

You can see from this charcoal drawing that there is looseness and charm to the line style and smudging that is moving away from simple contour or "coloring book"-style drawing toward a greater sophistication of expression. Not every line has been erased because it was "imperfect" (in fact I often ban erasers from class). You can see the anatomy under the surface: the bones supporting the animal. There is a sense of volume in the belly. This student has been given a high-grade piece of charcoal paper that allows the texture of the rubbings to take hold on the surface in a way that cheap construction paper cannot. The horse looks alive because the drawing technique is fluid and alive. Also, it has the look of an object rendered from a live model.

This second-grader, like many students her age, was very excited to be taught how to observe an animal like an artist and then how to go about getting it down on paper.