TRICIA TOONE | artist & teacher

Jessie Krause at the Netherfield Gallery

Sketchbook club just paid a visit to Jessie Krause at the Netherfield Gallery in Frenchtown. Jessie has a beautiful and diverse body of work: all personal, inspiring, and full of life. 

Sketchbook Club hiked to the gallery after school. It's so wonderful to have great artists like Jesse so close to home. We stepped in and students were immediately drawn into her work. Quite a few students said something like," I've walked past this so many times, and never realized what was inside!"

We sat and she showed us preliminary sketches for her work that later turned into beautiful, large-scale paintings. It was fascinating to see the original idea that was quickly sketched in oil pastel and compare it to the final oil painting. She discussed where her ideas come from and where she looks to for inspiration.

One of my favorite quotes from her talk was something to the effect of, "A sketchbook is like a filing cabinet of ideas". This was especially important to me since my primary goal for the Sketchbook Club is that they learn to grab inspiration when it comes. 

Each student then chose an aspect of one of her paintings to inspire a sketch and "make it their own". There was silence as they were each absorbed into their sketches. 

I think all of the young artists were inspired, as am I. Sucked into the right hemispheres of our brains, it was hard to leave at 4:00. I feel artistically refreshed and am about to dive into a new painting.

Pinhole Photography and Frenchtown History

Frenchtown Elementary School has been in the process of creating a documentary about the history of Frenchtown. Seventh and eighth graders have researching the local Frenchtown Cemetery including prominent families, civil war veterans, and monument symbolism and construction. 

In art, they created pinhole cameras from oatmeal containers and shoe boxes. We discussed the basic concepts that make a camera function. After some practice at school, we took a trip over to the cemetery to research the area and take photos with our pinhole cameras. 

Photos were taken with their cameras, then developed in the "Mobile Darkroom" aka van wrapped in black paper. (Please refrain from the "free candy" jokes. Heard enough at this point. Thank you 8th graders. : )

Students quickly got a sense of the factors and technical difficulties associated with photography, a nice contrast from the ease of the digital cameras and cell phone cameras they are used to.

The film stills shown were taken by Keith and Laura from River Union Stage, who are coordinating the Frenchtown Documentary. The Frenchtown Documentary premier will be shown on June 12. More details to come.

Scarecrows at Frenchtown Pumpkin Festival

The Language Arts Teacher and I collaborated to have the middle school students create scarecrows for the first annual Frenchtown Pumpkin Festival.

In groups, students depicted characters from the books they are were reading in Language Arts. For instance, 7th grade recently read My Side of the Mountain. They wrote character descriptions for "Sam" and "Frightful". From there, they drew sketches, planned construction and materials, then constructed their "scarecrows".

Materials were open ended, but they mostly used paper mache, paint, found objects, clothing, etc. All paper mache was coated with a thin coat of either polyurethane or spar varnish. They worked for about 40-80 minutes per day for one week.

We crossed our fingers and hoped they would withstand the weather for a week to make it till the festival. We had horrible fall weather for most of the week! Heavy wind and rain! At this point, they've been out for three weeks and are all mostly intact! Unfortunately, "Frightful" (below) has lost his wings. (Lasted fairly long, though, considering those wings are quite heavy. The wet paper could only hold up so long.)

We all had a ton of fun and the town really enjoyed having the sculptures around. I'm hoping this will become an annual tradition.