In this article, first-grade students were taught the different kinds of lines that were part of the construction of various bridges--the curved lines of the arches of stone bridges, straight lines connecting the cables of a suspension bridge, vertical lines, horizontal lines, and so on. They gained practice in drawing structures and in fine brush…

Remember paint by numbers? This revived trend was a perfect solution to teaching geometric shapes to the author's first-grade students. Geometric shapes are identified and used in early elementary art classrooms, but this lesson gives students a deeper understanding of shape, encourages problem-solving, and makes a strong correlation between math…

It was nearing the end of a very long, rough winter with a lot of snow and too little time to play outside. The snow had formed small hills and valleys over the bushes and this was at the perfect height for the students to paint. In this article, the author describes how her transitional first-grade students created snow art paintings. (Contains 1…

In this article, the author offers Manet's last paintings as metaphors for a bygone, psychically healthy conception of loss and mourning, what is called the pre-Freudian, Victorian notion of loss (Otto 2008), which contrasts with the post-Freudian, Modern notion of loss and mourning (Otto 2008). Otto argues this liminal, transitional moment…

This activity began with a picture book, Nurit Karlin's "Fat Cat On a Mat" (HarperCollins; 1998). The author and her students started their project with a 5-inch circular template for the head of their cats. They reviewed shapes as they drew the head and then added the ears and nose, which were triangles. Details to the face were added when…

The house paintings of the South African Ndebele people are more than just an attempt to improve the aesthetics of a community; they are a source of identity and significance for Ndebele women. In this article, the author describes an art project wherein students use the tradition of Ndebele house painting as inspiration for creating their own…

The Dadaists were an unconventional group of artists who used their art to rebel against civilization in the early twentieth century. They experimented with a variety of media and often used machines as themes in their artwork. Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters incorporated city refuse into his collages, including bus tickets, newspapers, cartons,…

The reach of art therapy in assisting a hospice patient in confronting existential issues at the end of life is illustrated in this article with a case that took place over the course of 22 semiweekly sessions. Painting with an art therapist allowed the patient to shift from a state of anxiety and existential dread to a more accepting, fluid…

Computational aesthetics is a newly emerging cross-disciplinary field with its core situated in traditional research areas such as image processing and computer vision. Using a computer to interpret aesthetic terms for images is very challenging. In this dissertation, I focus on solving specific problems about analyzing the composition and style…

The 153 paintings that San Antonio-based artist Mel Casas calls Humanscapes were inspired by a glimpse of a drive-in movie screen. This article treats the first three years of work on this series, a period in which the artist referenced cinematic settings and audiences while registering aspects of the sexual revolution. Marshall McLuhan's…

The author's school is only 30 minutes from New York City, so every year when second-graders study towns and cities, the students do a project based on New York City landmarks. This year was the Statue of Liberty. The author introduced Peter Max's famous Pop art to her students, and explained that, as the art world kept changing, artists decided…

One can easily find a choice studio. In this choice-based art classroom, the students move comfortably within an organized structure of space, time and materials, managed by the teacher. They are well aware of their responsibilities and their possibilities. The teacher helps them to mine their lives and interests for the content of their…

Teaching the author's fifth-grade students a lesson on clothing design was a great way to show them how art and design are part of their everyday lives. It also allowed the students to express their personalities. Clotheslines served as an effective basis for their work. She and her class began by discussing how clothes can tell them about a…

Many painters use lines to express powerful emotions. Both Vincent van Gogh and Jean-Michel Basquiat had difficult lives filled with hardship, and died at a young age. They both used art to deal with their emotions. It seems like the stronger the feelings were in them, the faster the strokes were put down in their work. In this article,…

A hypothetical artwork is an artwork that exists only as a fictional creation of an art theorist. The explicatory powers of such hypothetical artworks are mainly used by an art theorist to reflect on an art theoretical issue under consideration. Such an artwork has an intriguing and paradoxical nature. On the one hand, it is only fictitious, but,…