By Emma Rausch
emma@thepaperofwabash.com
WABASH COUNTY, Ind. – Dozens of Wabash County youth picked up paintbrushes Monday, June 5, and kicked off the 2017 Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) summer art camp at the Charley Creek Gardens.
During the camp’s three one- to two-week programs, Kindergarten through 12th grade youth will work with local professional artists to learn new crafting techniques and hone design skills.
“The theme this year is color extravaganza,” artist Erica Tyson told The Paper of Wabash County. “So everything we do has something to do with color, color mixing, color creating, colorful objects.”
The camps explore art techniques and crafts that aren’t typical to academic artistic classrooms, according to Candie Cooper McCoart, artist and program instructor.
Tyson leads the S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) art camp, a relatively new program for Kindergarten to second grade students. Last year, the camp kicked off its first year after the VPA program finished, according to Tyson.
“We did our S.T.E.A.M. lessons a couple weeks after the regular VPA ended, so it was at a different time,” she explained, noting that this year’s camp was purposefully mixed into the primary program schedule “so they can see what Candie (Cooper McCoart) is doing, see what the other big kids are doing and aspire to it.”
Tyson’s group, which consists of 42 youth, have explored S.T.E.A.M. categories through child-friendly experiments tied to create art.
“I’ll give you an example. Yesterday we did chemical reactions,” Tyson said. “So the kids created artwork with paint, but we put paint, baking soda and vinegar inside a bag, then we talked about how a chemical reaction happens and then it created a gas, which exploded the plastic bag. We added math into as we had to measure our ingredients. We added engineering into it because we had to figure out how to make it so the baking soda did not react with the vinegar right away so we could get it closed.
“We had the art portion of it, the scientific side and then the technology part was we put all of our videos and pictures onto Seesaw (an online, student-driven digital portfolio website). Incorporating all of that is actually easier than you think it is.”
Artwork implements S.T.E.M. practices whether it specifically means to or not, Tyson later added.
Cooper McCoart’s class exemplified Tyson’s thought as it crafted junk bugs from rulers, spare jewelry, eating utensils and other objects.
“Engineering surfaces, contrast, that’s the thing. We really went into the mechanics on this one (craft) because we talked about how you can’t just stick a bunch of stuff together and expect it to stick,” Cooper McCoart told The Paper. “They have to really plan through it and learn that there’s a process to creating it.”
Through color exploration, Cooper McCoart’s VPA program has taught youth how artists through different art styles and crafts use color to design a picture or make the viewer feel an emotion.
“We’ve been doing anything and everything around color,” she said. “We started out studying an artist named Yoskay Yamamoto and he is an illustrator, he moved to the United States when he was 15(-years-old), and we talked about how cool it is you can go to his social media channels and drop him a message, ask him your questions because he’s a modern day artist. We’ve been studying his techniques with watercolor and illustration.
“In my camps,” she later continued, “I really try to touch on if you’re into drawing, we’ll have something for you. If you’re a sculpture, we’ll have something for you. No matter if you think in 3-D or 2-D, we will cover every area.”
By covering all art forms, youth have room to learn and try new techniques, and, along the way, make plenty of mistakes and sometimes fail.
“We talk about how … there are no ‘can’ts,’” Cooper McCoart said. “They’re going to do it. They’re going to see how easy it is and they’re going to feel better for trying. … And if it isn’t your jam, that’s ok maybe the drawing or the illustration part is. We try to help them find themselves.”
As a professional artist, Cooper McCoart has been through her fair share of failures and experiencing the “I can’t do it” phases, only to later realize that “the can’ts don’t exist.”
In the summer program, “you see the look on their faces when they think they can’t and then they can and that’s really what (this program) is all about,” she explained. “Feeling that scary, ‘Oh my gosh. I’m taking a leap of faith here.’ And then they do it and realize it wasn’t bad. It’s a good camp.”
Programs like VPA are important to the Wabash community because they cater to the artistic youth, according to Cooper McCoart.
“I’m a product of these camps. I went to these camps when I was little and I wasn’t into sports,” she said. “It’s really important to me that we have something for everybody and also anytime we can give kids the experience of making something with their hands or singing a song or making something from noting, it’s those simple pleasures in life that even if they never end up being an artist, it’s something that makes them feel good.”
At the VPA summer art program’s conclusion on Friday, June 16, the youth’s artwork will be hung in the Honeywell Center where it will be displayed until the art reception on Wednesday, June 28.
The art reception, which will take place at the Honeywell Center, will recognize students for completing the program with a certificate presentation ceremony beginning at 5 p.m.