Painting Colaboration Project Idea

As we all know collaboration and working together with others are important parts of today's world. Who other than myself to teach this to high school students getting ready to head out into the vastly open world? While researching for synthesis painting ideas I adjusted my search to include collaborative paintings and the Google image search gave me results that I did not expect; several people painting on the same canvas. If you are an artist you may know that one of the unspoken golden rules is "don't touch other people's artwork." Why not take that fear and hostile way of thinking away and establish harmony into one piece of art? This gives me the lesson plan idea. I would have students take an every day object or image and have them abstract it to where it is no longer recognizable as the image. I would keep it a secret that they will eventually take their piece and have to collaborate with other students to create one huge artwork incorporating everyone's abstracted objects. This would teach the students how to work together under potentially stressful situations and increase verbal communication skills. In addition, this will show students what they can do together as a group and how little effort they had to put forth to make their small piece of the puzzle fit into the greater scheme of things.


Another idea hatched with the same concept in mind would be to have a large image squared off into different parts (like a tic-tac-toe board) where each student had to complete their corresponding part of the large image. The goal wold be to have all of the students work together to make a replica of the large image where as all the lines match up. It would be obvious who would collaborate with others because their lines would line up with the their classmates portions of the large image.. Therefore, the grade would not necessarily be on the artwork itself but on how well they work with others.

In addition to learning communication skills in an art environment I could use the fact that many artworks through history have ben completed as a group effort not only by one artist. For example, several sculptures in the 15th century took several years to complete and sometimes  the commission would not be complete when a sculptor passes away. I personally always thought that all art was "one piece, one name, one artist" but that is not always the case. In Claus Sluter's "Tomb of Phillip the Bold" he passed away before he could complete his commission. Claus de Werve finished the sculpting of the tomb and "The Mourners." Here is a short VIDEO that is an in depth look at the piece. Anyway, not only is cooperation an important as a life skill it has been used in art for centuries, despite popular belief.