The Math, Music and Science of Art
While you won’t find Leonardo DaVinci busy at work in the art room at Bear Creek, you will find the same practices he used in either painting his masterpieces or creating one of his thousands of inventions. Creativity, observation, problem solving, imaging the whole and fitting together the pieces, developing spatial relationships, risk taking, and the ability to dream are nurtured daily.
The art room is alive with hands-on science. Children experience moist clays turning into rock hard pots, chimes, and masks, and their chalky glazes turning vibrant and shiny through heating. Also, materials like plaster and paper mache, wet with water, turn hard with drying. Children mix the three primary colors to create all colors. They find, through resist processes, that certain materials do not interact, or interact in strange ways and produce surprising pieces of art. Like one of the first ornithologists, Audubon, they learn to think about and draw what they observe.
Through the exploration of art and culture, they unearth what archeologists and anthropologists have discovered. The art room is a very comfortable place for encountering science in its day to day guise.
Art connects with math just as easily as with science. If you are thinking in terms of lines, two or three dimension geometrical shapes, patterns, symmetry, proportions, spatial relationships, balance, perspective, topology, or measurements, you may be entrenched in a math problem or creating an artistic masterpiece.
Art and music have always been sisters of the creative mind. Rhythm, harmony, balance, mood, and movement, to name just a few, are shared terms. The disjointed sounds of modern jazz could be the visual images of Picasso. Each visual artist could find its counterpart in a musical score. Music and art are important components of any culture, and in many cases, are all we know of some cultures.
Imagine Van Gogh painting outside. An occasional gust makes the wind howl and the grass ripple in waves. The birds are creating a background melody and the artist is capturing this music of nature in short, swift brushstrokes that echo the dancing rhythm of an orchestra (Second grade, Van Gogh Landscapes).
Now, let’s picture Matisse, dazzled by the intricacy of patterns, filling his canvas with a vast array of repeating colors (First grade, Matisse Still Life).
Or, can you imagine, Calder, the engineer, designing a mobile that is perfectly balanced and revolves with the air current (Third grade, Calder Mobiles).
If we stand back and look at all cultures what we see is the mandala, a symmetrical design radiating out from a central point, or geometry in one of its most colorful forms (Fourth grade, Mandala).
And what culture does not have a weaver, manipulating threads into staid and exotic fabrics (Fifth grade, Weaving).
On a more playful note, remember those purchased items that come with reams of instruction for assembly, and must be carefully followed before that mass of pieces becomes anything resembling the coveted prize? But the prize can be well worth the work, especially sprinkled with imagination (Kindergarten, Robots and Counting).
While the art room is where the production of wondrous pieces of art takes place, it is also the place that nurtures the mind in all its aspects and draws upon its neighboring disciplines for inspiration.