Tile Mural by Khemraj, Rajasthan

Potter Khemraj combines contemporary imagery with traditional technique in a 'stacked' bas relief mural showing a village being consumed by the modern aspects of a larger town. This could be a fun subject for a mural for children, showing some new aspect of technology impacting life as we know it...each child works on a different tile but makes sure that horizontal lines match up for consistency. Children work on square slabs, using coils and clay 'buttons' and other basic hand building techniques to create their scenes. To achieve this raw, weathered, feeling, bisque-fired tiles can be dipped in black glaze, then scrubbed so glaze only lingers in the grooves and edges, before the final firing.

 

Terra cotta horse mural project

 

These large horses were created by villagers in Tamil Nadu so that the protector Aiyanar (the guardian of the fields) could ride them at night to chase away evil demons, thereby ensuring good luck for the town and harvest. Different horses from different areas were decorated with different types of objects and creatures. Smaller sections were created on the wheel, fired separately, and then attached to make these life sized creatures.

In an earlier post I mentioned ideas for individual projects responding to these giant horses, but I just learned about this website, that turns images into large scale half-tone pictures that can be printed out on multiple sheets of regular paper to create an enormous mural. It could be fun to run this image, or a picture of a regular horse, through this process, and invite kids to decorate the different horse sections using either red or brown paint on day one and detail brushes and black paint on another day, or any other material, like black marker for the decorations and pastels for everything else. This is also in keeping with the manner in which the actual sculptures were pieced together by members of the community, so there's a nice symmetry to doing it this way.

 

Clay-relief Sculptures of Sarguja

 

Every year after harvest there is a big festival called Chherta where every house is repaired, whitewashed, and freshly decorated with clay reliefs...women try to outdo each other to make their houses the most attractive. These become incredibly vivid 3-D murals with characters half on/half off the wall, other materials like string and wire are added as well. Whitewashed backgrounds have radiating and/or swirled-line grooves that the women make using their fingers.

For individual project panels, children could create backgrounds using white paint on cardboard, swirling their fingers in smooth strokes to create a similarly textured canvas...(tempera or acrylic paint could be thickened with cornstarch or gel medium to hold the texture). In a subsequent class they could create characters using a theme like 'playing with friends' or 'climbing a tree.' Construction paper collage would work but shouldn't be glued down to the background all the way, as some 3-D effect best captures the real thing. True 3-D with paper mâché pulp or model magic would be great. Either way, found elements like string and wire should be incorporated.

This would make a great mural project as there can be multiple work areas, and everyone doesn't have to be standing at the mural at the same time. Real whitewash can be used, its lack of true opacity and its affordability, not to mention its authenticity, would be great. A collaborative mural wherein children from different classes and grades contribute their 3-D objects and they are attached to the wall by a teacher or by an older class would work nicely.

 

Click here for a video tour of the mural:

 

Maru potters of Rajasthan

The Maru potters did not believe, as some cultures did, that deities reside in stone but rather in clay because of the nature of its elements. They believe a pot is like a person in that there is a birth and a death (the inevitable break), and that a broken pot will eventually return to nature, as people do. Likewise, they believed that a good potter perspires when he kneads wet clay which means potter and clay permeate each other and become one. The clay becomes infused with the potter, the potter takes on elements from the clay as well. In some villages the potters are also priests, taking the respect for this profession and its proximity to the life and death cycle to another level entirely.

This is not an art lesson idea as much as an invitation to rethink how clay is presented. In every clay program children are taught to pound and work the clay in a rough manner in order to prevent air bubbles which could cause items to explode in the kiln. The kneading is billed as being necessary in order to prevent something bad from happening, not as something beneficial in its own right. I think it would be a great visual for clay-workers of any age to have when conditioning their own clay--imagining that the true goal is to become 'one with the clay' through the hard work of kneading and pounding. In fact, now that I know this reason for wanting sweat to mingle with clay, it seems like a wasted opportunity if a potter's only goal is such a mechanical one.

Here he is in action, mixing lots of sand into the clay, as well as mica. The clay is fired in a outdoor kiln at about 650*F.

 

Bandhani tie-dye

Tie-dye is a common technique with an almost magical element of surprise when the twisted, knotted piece is unravelled and the colors and patterns are revealed.

Bandhani (means 'to tie' and is the origin of the word bandana) fabrics are knotted with hundreds of little knots, sometimes at random, sometimes along a washable blue stencil. Traditionally the women tie the knots, and whisper secrets or share stories while they tie them. Later when the fabric has been dyed (by men) and unknotted, by simply tugging it open, the woman (often a bride) who wraps herself in it is essentially cloaking herself in women's experiences. The knots are made by pinching little bunches of fabric together and then wrapping thread around the bunch many times, some women can tie as many as 700 knots in a day. When Bandhani are sold, the knots are left in so the buyer can be sure she isn't purchasing a fake.

Introducing this technique as part of any tie-dye lesson or activity would enrich the experience of preparing the fabric to be dyed. These secret-bearing knots could be one option alongside more common twists and rubber bands. In fact, introducing the idea of attaching secrets or stories (by giving voice to them as you work) to any kind of tie-dye preparation be it regular strings or rubber bands, thereby infusing the end product with such importance, would be a wonderful and memorable practice. In keeping with the communal gift nature of the process though, an entire class could work together on a large piece of fabric, while reminiscing about childhood memories or experiences from that year in school. The resulting fabric could be given then, as a gift to a departing teacher, or other important figure from their shared experience.

Kolams (Rangoli)

In Pondicherry in the south of India, women decorate the ground in front of their house every morning with designs called kolams. They use a mixture of rice flour and pigment and use templates or work freehand. It was believed that it was important to always have a welcoming home, and the fact that creatures like birds, squirrels, and ants would eat the rice flour was a part of this idea of providing an inclusive environment (also Lakshmi, the goddess of posterity might show up!). As the day goes on the kolams are trampled and the artwork disappears and then the next morning the women sweep and wash the ground (sprinkling it with water) and reapply them, making a brand new design each day. It is important that every line is closed, to prevent evil spirits from entering. Women stand up, but bend over the entire time they create, and so it's considered to be good for digestion, reproductive organs, and a good form of morning exercise and stretching. Modern templates are made by using blue block-out on silk screen-like screens (round) or by punching holes in tins...a handful of rice flour goes in the tin and when the tin is tapped on the ground the pattern comes out. Fancy borders are made using tubes that have holes punched in them..traditionally they were made out of (clay or) tin but the ones I saw from Pondicherry were just thin lengths of PVC piping. The little tubes are packed with rice flour and then rolled on the ground to make patterns for the borders.

We could replicate the tin stencils by punching holes in sturdy paper plates. And thin cardboard tubes (the kind that come with wrapping paper) would be great for rolling borders. This could be a fun and meaningful school art project, if teams of children were to be assigned the front of the school from one day to the next. It's a nice step up from sidewalk chalk, and would also be a wonderful introduction to the idea of impermanence in artwork. Design and pattern suggestions can be found at http://www.ikolam.com/

Here are the stencils:

This is what it looks like when the rice flour is pressed through:

 

Tagore Doodles

Painting didn't come easily to Nobel prize for Literature winner Rabindranath Tagore though he worked at it for a long time. He did however make a habit of turning his written mistakes, cross outs, etc into elaborate drawings and doodles as he wrote. "He turned struck-out words into ornamental motifs and sometimes linked the scratched out words on the pages of his manuscripts into an art-nouveau-like arabesque .....Victoria Ocampo who spotted these during his stay in Argentina as her guest was impressed and found artistic merit in them. "He played with erasures,‟ she wrote, "following them from verse to verse with his pen, making lines that suddenly jumped into life out of this play: prehistoric monsters, birds, faces appeared.‟'* Tagore went on to be recognized as a great painter, and was the first Indian artist to have artwork displayed around the world.

*Current Exhibitions Upcoming Exhibitions Past Exhibitions. "Rabindranath Tagore: The Last Harvest | New York". Asia Society. Retrieved 2012-12-18.

As a way to acknowledge and reconcile our own inevitable 'mistakes and cross-outs' I think it would be great to collect them in the art room as the year goes by, or encourage other teachers to contribute, and have children choose 'a mistake' to use as a starting point for any type of artwork, depending on the materials at hand and the time frame. It could be the community scrap bin that kids turn to when they finish with something else or they could be distributed randomly and incorporated into paintings or collages, sketches, etc. imagine a whole display of artwork made from other people's mistakes or false starts. It sends a good message about upcycling as well.