Level Three. Art, but not as you know it.

Level Three. Art, but not as you know it.

By Michelle Lloyd.

It was a bit of a muddle in R V’s mind. Which way to do things and how to apply himself, were both contentious issues. At school the method with which lessons were learnt could be important and the teacher had attempted to teach everybody by the same rule of thumb.

A whiz at certain subjects, R V was not so adept at others, or at least he didn’t believe himself to be all that great at them. When he asked his mum, why he had such trouble with particular problem solving, she had explained that he had a skill set all of his own. At the time this had not made much sense to him, but this was all about to change.

Out and about was not somewhere that R V had thought the class would take him. In the school building R V had been known to have trouble in more arty type of pursuits. Classes as such where he required to stray away from the facts and figures and go with the flow, left him feeling bamboozled and stressed. He ended up having a lot of worry, angst and nothing to show for it all by the end of the class.

After discussions with his mum, their teacher had decided to take the art class down a different route. This was how they had all ended up out in the middle of their school field. R V felt himself tense up as their previous route march came to an abrupt halt.

An announcement was made about what was expected of them and the class was told all about their art objective. R V could not understand how this time the class was going to be any different to all of the others and he was left bemused once again.

Having felt that it was all too much for him R V decided that he should not bother getting involved. After he watched everybody else in the class getting in to the task at hand, he wondered off to a far off corner of the field where he intended to sit and recite his much loved number patterns again. At least that way he felt as if he was achieving something and more importantly he would be comfortable.

R V’s little linger on his beloved numbers did not last too long, as his teacher quickly went over to him. She explained to him that this class might not be like any other art experience he had been a participant of before. She took him gently over to the spot where his classmates where gathering small blocks, colourful sheets and natural objects. None of it made sense to R V but he was asked to go over and gather whatever interested him and then go and place it on the larger expanse of exposed land.

R V put trust into the experiment and did as he was asked. Before too long going over to choose whatever he felt instinctively pulled to had started to feel good and he got into a bit of a routine of doing it over and over again.

At the end of the class, while everybody had felt they had been involved and enjoyed what they had done, they could not actually see any defined result from it. That was when the teacher disclosed that one of the school staff had been poised at the top of the building to take several pictures of their collective achievement.

Back inside the school building and in class pictures of an awe-inspiring display of colours and patterns made up their artistic, colourful image of their very own school. It was unbelievable and R V could not have enjoyed the experience more. He had not even felt like he had been doing art at the time but looking at the picture of what he had helped to make, filled him with pride. It just went to show that doing something slightly differently could bring about vastly different results.