Creators of a new art program hope to teach children the basics behind the square houses and stick figures that grace Davis County refrigerators and office cubicles.
After a year of renovations, the Bountiful/Davis Art Center has opened the Jean Madsen Children’s Center with hands-on art activities for kids, preschool-age and older.
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The center, located at 745 S. Main St, houses seven stations that each concentrate on a different element of visual art: line, shape, color, value, form, texture and space.
"We’ll change the projects every three to four months," said Theresa Otteson, the BDAC’s education coordinator. "So we’re building a library of projects."
At the line station, children view Van Gogh’s drawing, "Arles: View from the Wheat Field." Their task is to identify the many types of lines. They may discover curves that depict smoke billowing from a chimney; or short, straight lines that carpet the foreground as stems of felled wheat; or angled lines that create the pattern on a peasant’s dress. Students then complete a worksheet to build a chart of lines: zig zag, spiral, circle, dotted and more.
To learn about texture, children handle plates with distinct textures. Then, they make rubbings to distinguish the real texture — what they feel on the plate — from the visual texture, which appears on paper.
At the shape station, children identify various shapes in the image of an elephant. Afterward, they try to draw their own pictures using only shapes they know. For form, they handle a three-dimensional origami creation. For color, students overlap the primary colors — red, blue and yellow — to create a color wheel that includes purple, green and orange. And for value, they choose a crayon and color a series of boxes from dark to light.
The activities are designed to give students basic, concrete examples that will help build a foundation for learning difficult, abstract concepts later. A concept such as perspective — or depth in a two-dimensional image — involves a lot of trigonometry. But it is not so tricky at the center’s station on space.
"They take an object as simple as a circle, and they repeat it, making it smaller and smaller and smaller, so it looks like it’s receding in the distance," Otteson said. "We have to keep it simple and quick, because we’ve aimed it at young children. Before they lose interest, their project is finished."
Admission to the center is free, but donations are welcome. The center is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Tuesday through Friday; 2 to 5 p.m. Saturdays; and on the third Monday of every month during the BDAC’s Family Art Nights. The center was created with a grant from Target and labor donated by Salt Lake City-based Big-D Construction.
Since the renovation was completed in December, the center has hosted walk-in families and children’s groups through Boy Scouts, churches and pre-schools, Otteson said. Bountiful preschool owner Jennifer Brooks takes her students to the BDAC every other year and said the children’s center’s guided activities can help re-emphasize the basics schools try teach with art.
"Despite all the hype about the discovery-learning of things, small children won’t discover those elements by themselves," Brooks said. "But if you isolate each element and point them out to the child, the child will be able to recognize them and will have a vocabulary to talk about it. Most children need one piece at a time instead of it all packaged together."
Brooks said scaling projects down to a single element can especially help kids who tend to be disappointed in their own artwork.
"If they don’t have the knowledge to draw what they want to draw, that frustrates them," Brooks said. "But the beautiful thing is, a little art instruction goes a long way with younger children."
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