Alice Matthews Gentili
How I Spent My Summer Vacation One/Gardening
“Take thy plastic spade, It is thy pencil; take thy seeds, thy plants, They are thy colours. – William Mason, The English Garden, 1782 This is the first in a series of posts written after a summer of Covid-19 pandemic quarantine. I believe we as a society have exhausted all the negative adjectives (uncertain, unprecedented, unimaginable, etc) […]
End of Year Message 2020
Art is a language unto itself. Along with speaking and writing, you have inside you your own artistic voice. It is a powerful voice to harness when you really want to say something. Art can be your best friend when you’re trying to work through what’s going on in the world around you. – Alice Gentili […]
Drawing Act 150 Submissions
The first section of chapter thirty-eight of the General Statutes is hereby amended so as to include Drawing among the branches of learning which are by said section required to be taught in public schools. – Massachusetts Drawing Act of 1870 I began posting about the 150th anniversary of the Massachusetts Drawing Act on March […]
The 5/6 Miscoe Hill Art Show Has Been Updated
“The artist’s job is to be a witness to her/his time in history.” – Robert Rauschenberg The Miscoe Hill 5/6 virtual art show has been updated! I’m always proud to share the creative work of our young artists with our school and greater community. I’m especially proud to be able to share the work created by my […]
Stop Motion Animation/Wk11 Remote Learning
“Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.” – Hayao Miyazaki We’re nearing the end of remote learning for this school year. The final assignment, Stop Motion Animation, is meant to introduce many of my students to creating animation to harness their emotions and creativity through story telling. The posted […]
Presenting Photography/Wk10 Remote Learning
“My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” — Steve McCurry When we wrapped up our focus on drawing during week eight of remote learning, it was time for something completely different. Photography. Specifically, a look at photographic composition based on the work of photographer Steve […]
Drawing Act150/Human Made Object/Wk8 Remote Learning
“The teacher showed us how to see proportions, relationships, light and shadow, negative space, and space between space – something I never noticed before! In one week, I went from not knowing how to draw to sketching a detailed portrait. It literally changed the way I see things” Daniel H. Pink This post features the work […]
DrawingAct150/Light on White/Wk 7 Remote Learning
“There is strong shadow where there is much light.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe For the past two weeks, we’ve been looking at the way light falls on an object and trying to capture it in a drawing with pencil on paper. Our focus on drawing is directly influenced by the celebration of the Massachusetts Drawing […]
Make A Chicken Project/Wk 5 Remote Learning
“Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.” – Aesop Because if you do, surely you will have underestimated. Both the quantity and quality of the Make A Chicken project assignment far exceeded my expectations for my art students in grades 5 and 6 at Miscoe Hill School, in Mendon, MA. Three key events came […]
5&6 Art Show at the Miscoe Hill EXPO 2020
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” —Theodore Roosevelt Before quarantine, tonight I would have hosted the annual Art Show at the #Miscoe Hill EXPO for my 5&6th gr art students & their families. Believing exhibition is important for young artists, I created a virtual show via ThingLink and my students […]
“Do You Feel The Vibes?” Art Club Interactive Bulletin Board
“Do you feel the vibes?” In October 2019, the Miscoe Hill 5/6 Art Club created an interactive bulletin board to represent emotions through paintings and music. They traced each other in positions that represent the emotions they were trying to convey and then used tempera paint on cardboard to fill the tracings in with color. They […]
At Home With The Every Day Drawing Challenge
Happy Saturday! I’m happy you can join me for this presentation! Please feel free to add comments below the video. I’ll respond just as soon as I can! Thank you for coming!
Drawing Act 150: Let’s Celebrate
“Drawing depends upon two faculties – understanding and taste; skill being the result of practice or experience. It is of the utmost consequence that the first faculty should be developed in harmony with the second.” – Walter Smith This May we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Massachusetts Drawing Act. On May 16, 1870 legislators […]
Sketchbook Cover Constellations
“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.” – Stephen Hawking Sketchbook Covers We started a new semester (2 terms) on January 23. After making folders to hold artwork for the next few months, […]
Winter Scenes
“I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove.” – Jack Kerouac Yesterday was March 1. Spring is just 17 days away. Yet, except for cold air, it hasn’t felt or looked very wintery around here. Fortunately, my fifth and sixth grade art students can create winter from memory and their imaginations. […]
Youth Art Month 2020 5/6 Artists
“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” – Michelangelo It is my pleasure to announce the artworks and artists for this year’s Boston Youth Art Month show! The Massachusetts Art Education Association sponsored Youth […]
Reimagined Book Covers
“The illustrations in picture books are the first paintings most children see, and because of that, they are incredibly important. What we see and share at that age stays with us for life.” – Anthony Browne Over the past few weeks, my fifth and sixth grade art classes have been reimagining book covers for their […]
Cardboard Creatures – Phase Three – Design for 3D Printing
“There are 3D people stuck in a 2D world” – Katherine Douglas, Choice-Based Art Education in the Classroom (TAB), (Douglas & Jaquith, 2018) “…especially in school art classes.” – Mona Lisa Lives Here I am blessed with a son who participated fully in an entire childhood filled with art making experiences, from extra-curricular classes I offered at […]
Cardboard Creature Project – Phase Two – Stop Motion/Green Screen
“My filmmaking really began with technology. It began through technology, not through telling stories, because my 8mm movie camera was the way into whatever I decided to do.” – Steven Spielberg Starting with a quote by Steven Spielberg may seem like a lofty way to begin a post about video making by upper elementary students. To […]
Cardboard Creature Project – Phase One – Build
“The most sophisticated people I know – inside they are all children.” – Jim Henson The photo above is of me and a whole bunch of cardboard on October 8, 2019 as I waited to introduce our Cardboard Creature project to an incoming class. It was all down hill from there! Here’s how we did […]
