Sub Art

I've put these pictures up elsewhere, but I thought it might be good to put them up here, too, with a little more commentary. The general background is that I've been substitute teaching in the Richmond school district for a few weeks now; mostly that means giving the kids worksheets and keeping them quiet. (Oddly enough, my years of classroom experience has not prepared me one whit for this!) Last Friday I was a sub in an art class: whoo hoo! But most of the kids didn't seem as interested in drawing and reading about art as I was. In any case, they were relatively well behaved and let me doodle.

The top two pictures were inspired by an article on Jim Dine: he has many figures in a blank or sparse field, known as "negative space," and some of his notable figures are hand tools. My figures are usually people, but they float in blank space; if any space is "negative," it's the space between Mr. Miro and Mai.

The next piece was inspired by a Soviet-era poster, but interlaced with a medieval-style illustration of a flower. Mostly I did it for the lettering, and the Cyrillic figures are easier for me to manipulate than regular Roman letters. The image came from a magazine looking at different poster designs; the main article in that magazine was on Barbara Kruger (which is partly why I shied away from the typical red and white, associated both with Soviet posters and Kruger's work, in very diferent ways).

The Magic Square was mentioned in the novel I'm reading, Dr. Faustus by Thomas Mann, and comes from an engraving by Albrecht Dürer.

Finally, "the Virgin Mai" is a study for a larger piece that I've been thinking about since visiting Brian and Stephanie in Berkeley this past December.

These pieces don't have a real thematic unity, but all except the middle poster were drawn while I was overseeing the students; "Fulfilled Plan, Great Work" took a few more days to complete, but the basic idea was sketched out in the art room.

I've been enjoying being a sub more than I expected, but it's still a challenge, in that I don't know the students or have much say about what goes on. I certainly don't have the opportunity to draw while teaching my college classes!