Students get up close and personal with artists

Students in TK through fifth grade at Lake Arrowhead Elementary School are being given an extraordinary opportunity to learn about renowned artists right in their classroom.

Through the Meet the Masters program, the students most recently studied Frederic Remington. Earlier this year they learned about Grant Wood; in the spring they will be exposed to the work of Georgia O’Keeffe.

The program is offered to the school through the PTA and is presented by parent volunteers. The PTA, according to program chair Lindsey Villarreal, purchases the educational materials from the nationwide Meet the Masters program.

Villarreal took over as chair last year and started with just seven volunteers. Today 23 parents have stepped up to help out.

“We have three different levels of difficulty,” Villarreal said. The TK students and first-graders do the beginning level of art projects; second and third-graders do the intermediate level and fourth and fifth-graders do the advanced version.

In addition to recruiting the volunteers, Villarreal is responsible for training them for each artist. She also prepares the materials for each project, providing the required supplies for each student.

LAE’s librarian, Nathalie Granger, puts on an educational presentation to each class prior to the art lesson the students do based on the artist’s work.

In Ms. Needham’s first-grade class on March 6, Villarreal reminded the students they had learned about Frederic Remington the week before. “Remember he loves to do pictures of the wild, wild West,” she told the students, asking what sort of things he liked to paint.

“Cowboys – horses – Indians,” were some of the answers. “And the desert,” Villarreal said.

She then explained they would be making their own desert landscape sunset picture using chalk. “It’s going to be very messy!” she warned.

Villarreal had created a sample for the children to emulate but she stressed to them that each of their works of art would be their own individual expression.

The first step was for the students to use a piece of yellow chalk to make the base of a rainbow on a large piece of black paper. The yellow was followed by orange, red and blue (for the sky). 

Then, using a tearing technique, the students created mountains and a plateau on a smaller piece of black paper. They glued that onto the bottom of their “chalky work.”

“Who knows what a triangle is?” Villarreal asked. She then demonstrated how they should draw and cut out isosceles triangles to create teepees. “Make them tall,” she suggested.

And finally, the students traced their index fingers and thumbs to create a cactus, which they cut out and glued on to their artwork with the teepees.

After gluing the artist profile on the back and writing their names, the students gathered for a photo, proudly holding up their creations.

The students, Villarreal said, love Meet the Masters “because you don’t have to be a natural artist to make a beautiful piece of artwork. Nor do the volunteers need to have a background in art to teach it.

“It gets parents into the classrooms and out of their comfort zones after they realize the simplicity of the steps provided to instruct and create the project.”

Not only that, Villarreal said, but “students absolutely love art! It gives them a break from their normal routine and gives them a chance to create little masterpieces of their own. It’s always surprising to see how well they do.

“My absolute favorite thing,” Villarreal said, “is to see how proud some of them are of themselves and their art.”