Portraits of the Artists as Young Poets
The Frog Hollow Portrait Exhibits
First of all, a couple of quick things: it’s Frog Hollow Poetry Prize time. Any young poet, ages 13 and under, can enter. We want to see their poems! Send us their best one by May 1st for a chance at fame, glory, and cold hard cash.
Second, Frog Hollow enrollment opens for new students on April 15th, but you can register now to be given waitlist priority. Come join us!
Frog Hollow Portrait Exhibits
I’m so thrilled to share that Frog Hollow students have two art and poetry exhibits going right now. One is in the Carnation Library, and one in the hallway gallery at Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in Seattle. Both will be up until early June (the Carnation one will have a second wave of pieces switched in on May 7th), so swing by and check them out if you’re in the area.
These exhibits are the culmination of a months-long inquiry into the Self in Context. We wrote many poems exploring who we were, where we came from, and our families and culture. We made family trees, collected family stories, explored the letters of our names, and so many other things that have faded into the hazy distance of last fall.
The exhibits are pairs of work by each child: a collage portrait and a portrait poem. Most of them center on exploring the children’s essence symbolically, through metaphor, image, and color. The children were asked questions like, “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? If you were a dance move, what dance move would you be?” The results span the full range of kid-art, from goosebumpy-beautiful to funny/gross.
They were asked to portray themselves symbolically in their visual art as well. For instance, if they loved soccer, we didn’t want them to draw a soccer ball on their portrait, but to try to draw the essence of soccer. Maybe that was a kind of wavy line that felt like what running quickly felt like. Maybe it was the arc of the ball being kicked up. Maybe it was their team colors.
Thanks to Michelle, who has been working in my Friday class and who will be our lead Thursday teacher next year, students learned many art concepts and techniques that they incorporated into their pieces. They learned about mother colors, and how to use watercolors. We thought about making visual echoes. I am SO excited about the results. I hope you can come see them!
The prompts:
Essences
The writing prompt that most of the poems responded to was a variation of the game of essences, which I learned on Sierra Institute, a backpacking field studies program I did in college.
In the game version, one person thinks of someone in the group. Everyone asks questions like, “If this person were a ___, what kind of ___ would they be?” If they were a body of water, what kind of body of water would they be? If they were a vehicle, what kind of vehicle would they be? Etc. The person who is thinking of another person answers, describing the secret person’s essence, not their favorite things or how they look. Eventually, people try to guess who it is.
In my class, we played this game, and wrote all the questions on the board as we went. Then students wrote a poem about their own essences. Some of them used the form, “If I were a ___, I’d be a ___.” Some just wrote, “I’m a maple tree full of squirrels. I’m a deep cold lake on a calm day.” Or, being kids, “I’m a fart….”
Portraits
For our visual portraits, we started with silhouettes. This gave the portraits a layer of realism without having kids have to try to draw themselves, which we felt would be frustrating for them because they would want more accuracy than they would get.
They cut their silhouettes out, and layered onto them. We asked them to layer on at least three layers, to include at least five things that symbolized them, and to have the image go off the edge of the paper. Layers included watercolors, tissue paper, stenciled letters, words cut out of magazines, fabric, art paper, cellophane, other random collage materials, crayon, and black marker.
Then they painted backgrounds, glued their silhouettes on, and added anything they wanted to join the two together.
After that, they wrote their essence poems, or another self-portrait poem, onto a nice piece of paper and decorated it to echo their portrait.