Step into Mrs. Brooks’ classroom, where creativity knows no bounds. With pencils poised and enthusiasm in the air, students dive into a world of self-discovery under her thoughtful guidance. We grabbed a few minutes to talk with Mrs. Brooks about what her art students are learning and creating.
Q: Just before Thanksgiving break, you took about 30 Studio Art students to the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. Tell us more.
A: We do “weeklies” in class that are art history based, so I start the year covering works that the students would find in the MAG. This is so the kids that go on the trip are getting a real life experience of something they’ve otherwise only seen on a screen.
On the trip, they’re seeing different styles of art and work from many types of artists. So it’s a great trip, it really opens their eyes to, “oh, there’s more to what I’m seeing here,” and it gives them more connection to the work.
Q: And you were recently working on an interesting project that involves fire, right!?
A: Yeah, fumage! “Fumage” is a French word that essentially is painting or drawing with smoke. So as an experiment in drawing class we decided to try it out. I grabbed tiki torches and the students took the paper outside and worked it into the soot coming off the top of the flame, and then they erased through it, so “reverse drawing,” and then they also did some collage with it.
It was a fun experiment on another method of drawing. We had just finished something kind of tricky, so now this was something easier, because we’re about to do something even harder.
Q: What’s this upcoming tough project?
A: It’s called The Memory Project. It’s a little intense, but it’s one of the best projects I’ve done. Students receive a photo of a child in another area of the world. Our images are coming from Malaysia, so a lot of the kids participating are in an orphanage, or they are refugees.
What our students do is that they receive this picture and they then create a portrait of that child and send it back to them. The kids in Malaysia can then see that somebody across the world cares enough about them to spend that amount of time creating something that they can cherish for a long time. It’s really cool, because many of the children participating don’t have keepsakes from childhood, so now they will.
To start that, the ten students in my Drawing & Painting class are learning how to do facial proportions. I go one body part at a time – we’re practicing an eyeball today. After that we’ll be feeling prepped and ready to go. It’s a more meaningful project because they have to put in that time. Somebody’s counting on it somewhere else.
Q: How long will the students be working on their Memory Project portraits?
A: These aren’t due back to the organization until May, so if anything happens, we can make it work. But in general, the portraits usually take 3-4 weeks, depending on how much detail goes into them and how much time it takes to get started. A lot of times we have a lot of trepidation to get started.
Q: Your students recently sold some of their goods during Small Business Saturday. How did that go?
A: Shop Small went really, really well. It was in the Ohmann Theatre. I had three students that were able to show up for the day, and we made close to $200 selling their own work, so things like high fire bowls, and ornaments, and their printed bags are always a big hit. Those were woodblock printed.
I’m looking to use some of their funds to send out for a silk screen of our Lyons Arts logo, so that once we have the screens, the students can print more in-house. We could print shirts, sweatshirts, etcetera, and spend a little bit of their money to make a bunch of money.
So overall, they did really well at the sale. We were there from 9-1, we saw our LCSD carolers come through, plus they were hanging out getting real experience as a working artist, which is really neat. Not a lot of kids get that.
Q: You have a lot of work on display right now in the Earl Buchanan Auditorium Foyer, right?
A: Yes! Our current exhibit is called “Life is a House.” The students all have individual statements and a ceramic “gingerbread house” design – they used an actual gingerbread house as a template for the build. Each of the houses are about the students' chosen identity piece. One special thing to note is that we received six brand new wooden pedestals for the sculptures from Mrs. Jerri Martin’s father; he built them for us!
We are also featuring our sgraffito bowls that we started the year with, we used plaster molds to make those. We also have our large Post Malone puzzle piece, that’s a “reverse charcoal” drawing – white charcoal on black paper – that each student did one or two pieces and put together as an image. The fumage I mentioned earlier is down there as well.