Art education at a Munich primary school

           

The art of working with objects and seeing them in a new light is something that really appeals to children. It would often be the children viewing my creations that were able to name the component objects without a second thought, sometimes taking mischievous delight in doing so. A haircut made of a brush here, a straw-hat face there. Children's imaginations are really free to run wild once their ability to look at objects in a new way has been awakened. It was precisely this imagination that was the subject of my art morning, which I was invited to host by the Munich-Neuperlach primary school for forty children aged between 9 and 10. In terms of the schedule, I planned for us to work in four groups and create one piece of art per group, so I provided four boards and a wide range of different objects such as brushes, sieves, mortars, raffia flowers and cake tins to produce each piece.

The children had already been learning about my style of art, so after a short introduction, we looked at the objects together and formed rough ideas of what we wanted to use. The next stage was one that the children were very keen to start, and involved fixing the objects in place using screws or by threading a fine thread through holes in the board. The children then spent the final hour painting their creations and at the end of the session, each of them received a signed copy of my catalogue.