fotoplay: modern art

On Tuesday, I delivered to the Starrett Children’s Center two copies of my Fotoplay book. Those of you who are regular readers of This Playground will know that I’ve written about the kids at the Starrett Center in Belfast, Maine, since I began this blog. (Last year, I spent time at Starrett each week, testing out Fotoplay pages, and making art with the kids.) After I dropped off my books, it was decided that one book would remain whole, while the other would be separated from its binding; they could choose two pages each to complete. When I returned, only two days later, there was a treasure trove of completed pages that fairly knocked me out of my boots. I’ll be posting the work in a few posts, but for now, I’ll begin with some of the Fotoplay pages that feature my photographs of animals. The work above was created by 9 year old Alice, who created a twin sister with a funky mosaic centerpiece of a nose, accented architectural ears, and expressive eyeglasses, like eyes on a string.

This work was created by 3 year old (!) Annie, her first collage. I’m crazy about how she incorporated the sections of perforated paper from the top of the page into her carefully constructed hats. Each is it’s own unique collage, the four together, along with the photographic images, coalesce on the page…

This page was created by 9 year old Allison. How about that pompadour, made from someone else’s painted paper? And how about the other added collage elements, balancing, floating, completing the composition… A group of us spent significant time discussing which of Allison’s outfits we would actually love to wear. (All of them.)

This work was created by 6 year old Eliot, (whose found-object work I wrote about here), who told me that she was the big meercat on the right, and the others, her parents… I love Eliot’s palette, with the warm central core in those dynamic dancing hearts, framed by the cool book-ended blues, all mingling with the text underneath…

This is the work of 4 year old Tony, whose early Fotoplay pages I’ve posted before. (Like this one of the lines-of-energy elephant body at the end of the post.) I was told that he began with the space he called the “armpits”, which he intently filled with red. Again, the cool/warm palette, but this time the blue is icy, and the burst of red is fiery, amplified by the white page and the black/grey of the wings.

These last two pages were created by the same girl, Kassie, age 5. The coloring in the forms above creates a mod art-puzzle. Notice the purple eye with its yellow center.

And how about this? Compelling, modern, uninhibited…the essence of child-made art.

More completed Fotoplay pages from the Starrett Center kids (and their teachers!) coming soon…