Day 4…so much to share, so much to cover, so much to explore, and so much to complete.
Today was exciting, involving, inspiring and full of life lessons through art, full of opportunities to answer the question Who Am I? The youth had a full day to be artists and to explore their inner artists; a full day to tell stories. A huge shout out to Brunella for all of the time and thought she put into designing lessons and preparing materials for each student. Each carefully planned step took the youth deeper into using new tools, into adding layers of story, adding dimensions to what would have otherwise remained flat. She combined thought with ACT-ion.
The morning was spent creating multi layered self portraits using the photographs from Day 3 in addition to found materials provided by Brunella. The whole experience was so tactile. Each portrait stood out, all told stories. We learned that artistic expression has many layers, that mistakes can be turned into something beautiful, in fact there are no mistakes, just opportunities. Art is a process and is always in process.
One youth always destroys his work, rips his papers. He, of course crumpled up his portrait, poked big holes in his paper…tried to throw it all out…but we kept it and kept building on it. The result is pure art, portrait of a young person: crumpled, holes poked through, deep, unique and beautiful. What he tried to destroy, actually shone through as something beautiful, fragile, dark and light.
Another student depicted his life story in his portrait: his adoption, his illness, his healing, his connections, his strengths, what holds him together…the lines of his art are connected representing his links to his birth and adoptive families. Powerful.
Each portrait has a story. What do you see? Who do you see?
In the afternoon, David joined us and we worked on scripts, collaborating to make composite characters, developing scenes and shooting them.
As Brunella said, each script tells a story: of progression, of feeling one way and of moving forward and finding support to feel better and move towards/reaching goals. Students were encouraged to draw from themselves for their stories, which is where artists draw from. Each story grew from Day Three’s opening exercise, inspired and fuelled by the ten questions that were asked. The youth took ACT-ion to weave all of these elements together into artful and personal narratives.
Tomorrow…we add more layers…