…and looking forward to Saturday.

“Born in Paris, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange studied drawing and painting at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1945 to 1949. On December 21, 1952, she married the poet Paul Celan, whom she had met in November 1951. She then studied etching at the Atelier Friedlaender, in Paris, from 1954 to 1957. Many of her works are linked to the poems of Paul Celan.”

via butdoesitfloat, a site that continuously inspires me

If I was going to preschool tomorrow, I would share this video with the children and ask them what materials we could use to design our very own city of lights, the way it would look from space – then get right to it.

I think my college students would be into it…if they didn’t have so many assignments to finish.

“You should know this new type of flower pot HONBACHI released by a design company Tokyo Pistol. HONBACHI means “book pot”, and as its name suggests, HONBACHI is reproduced books as flower pots, reusing old to-be-trushed books, that are deteriorated after years. We introduce here HONBACHI and how one of the major paper material, books, are recycled and reproduced as new products that will add spice to your life.”

via SHIFT

A Google search for ‘children + self-portraits’ lead me to this VIDEO presented by deputy headteacher and art co-ordinator Peter Sanders. This “programme shows how portraiture is extended and developed by all the year groups at Lauriston School in Hackney, east London.

Portraiture is taken beyond the boundaries of drawing and painting by using methods such as face painting in the nursery and large-scale three-dimensional modelling for the older pupils. The programme explores how introducing new skills and working with a wide range of materials can produce diverse results.

One of the many benefits of doing a whole-school art project is that it gives pupils and teachers a chance to see the variety of approaches and outcomes that can spring from a common starting point. It shows different ways of working which can be easily applied to other projects.”

Teachers TV: Share clever ways to begin the educational journey, ideas to aid literacy and communication, and help pupils understand and relate to communities.”

If there is one exhibition I would like to attend before the end of 2009, it is this one.

Natalie Abadzi and Jim Green November 19th-24th Nolias Gallery 60 Great Suffolk Street London UK

Modular Forms by PLAY+SOFT “is a research project on new soft furnishings for young children, resulting in a line of around 200 products. The laboratory process involved the collaboration of twenty-eight international designers, teachers, and pedagogistas: the dialogue between pedagogy and design and the theoretical reflections that were developed.”

THE RIGHT TO GOOD PLAY
Carla Rinaldi – Reggio Children

“Play is a universal phenomenon, present throughout history. It is a shared knowledge, a silent knowledge accessed by children of every epoch and culture with incredible sensitivity, originality, and creativity. It is knowledge that is learned, but not taught. Play and playing, in fact, cannot be taught, just as you cannot tell someone to play. You play or you don’t play, because playing is a way of being in the experience, in reality, in life.
Play has its own intrinsic force and incisiveness, but also the aspects of jocosity and lightness for which it is too often viewed in opposition to learning, to work, to the “serious things that matter.” Yet play gives us a glimpse of ways and styles of being that are alternative to the dominant ones and, by suggesting paths of project design, engages us as individuals and educators.

In fact, if play is a framework within which the events of life can be interpreted, as suggested by Gregory Bateson, then giving quality to play means giving quality to “play-based thinking”; that is, to a way of relating to the world and to life that involves “putting yourself into play”, where imagination, transgression, humor, and irony become strategies of everyday life. For this reason, in order to construct welcoming contexts for play, we must make available times, spaces, furnishings, materials, and toys that lend themselves to play, that lend themselves to being used and transformed within the play.

Objects offered in their flexible identities, open to receiving the actions, thoughts, desires, and learning of children and adults who know how to “stay in the game.” But at the same time, objects (furnishings, materials, toys) that, thanks to their colors, shapes, and materials, are able to suggest possibilities, ideas, and emotions that enrich the projects of play, learning, and life of the children and adults alike.”

Eleanna Anagnos “describes her painting process as an ongoing dialogue between herself and the canvas. Her vision lies in the synthesis of accumulated marks and her marks, in concert, bear evidence of the events that fill our own lives: not just the noticeable ones, but also the moments sometimes beneath notice—those too small to see, even though daily life is suffused with them. Anagnos is not interested in the conventional beginning/middle/end narrative. Instead, her work is born without the notion of conclusion. Through a deep connection to her own process—by building up and breaking down, incorporating and wiping away, flipping the canvas, working more intuitively in one session and more formally in the next—Anagnos focuses on creating a system of exchange between personal history, mood, and the anxiety of a never-still mind and the formulations (volume, variation, repetition, touch, and color) of drawing and painting. To Anagnos, energy is what counts.

Her process imbues her paintings with a pulse, a rhythm that endures long after the artist decides her content can stand alone. Through manipulating paint and graphite, Anagnos examines the multiplicity of how paint is used: fast and slow, thick and thin, dripping or gobbed on. She slashes color across the canvas to cue movement; she leads us seamlessly and surprisingly from one thought, behavior, memory or action to the next; with an assertive and instinctual strike, she makes reference to aggression in ways planned decisions simply cannot intimate. Further, Anagnos gestures with the sturdiness of architecture, thereby holding together the elements of disorder. In relinquishing control of the work, Anagnos finds that meaning reveals itself. Her paintings breathe and exist as living proof of the abundant information, feeling, and physicality so intimately encoded in the process and therefore, in the raw paint itself.”

Format 31cm X 46,5cm X 0,3cm – Mat varnished recycled paper – Eyelet

Madame Mo is offering a 1st collection of decorative prints on the theme of the Japanese alphabet and published in the style of school imagery of the ‘50s, some with scenes of daily life and others elocution sheets. The first 15 letters are illustrated by a Japanese word translated phonetically into French and English as a means of learning about items of everyday life in Japan: animal, object, customs, feelings …
The aged, recycled paper is reminiscent of the charm of these old prints, which may be hung in any room in the house.

via minor details