Art fair shows off creativity

Las Vegas Day School displays winning works

Once a year, Las Vegas Day School, 3198 S. Jones Blvd., holds an art fair for students to show off their creativity to classmates and parents.

Pieces representing various class assignments filled the school's multipurpose room. The walls were covered with art and folding tables, usually in use for lunchtime, provided space for vertical and horizontal displays.

Throughout the room, colorful items caught the eye. There were books made on a computer and others that were hand-made.

There were designs for paper money, all using a portrait within a centered oval and basic borders.

There were still-life drawings that used lonely desert highway scenes. The children's perceptions of life were evident in them. Some had tumbleweeds blasting across the road cartoon-style. Another showed a car barreling down the road ignoring a warning to "watch out for snakes ... you could get bit."

Other art pieces ranged from clay pots to geometric drawings to self-portraits to sandblasted glass.

Perhaps the most detailed were the clay figurines created for a fifth-grade assignment. The theme was "storyteller" and most students obviously felt obligated to include at least one tiny child sitting in their subject's lap.

All the pieces in the art fair were created from class projects assigned by art teacher Becky Crowe. When she gives an assignment, children often take the idea and run with it in directions adults don't even consider.

This year, Crowe added a new assignment to her roster, using newspaper in art. The idea was to take a sheet of newspaper, tightly roll it around a small dowel rod until it resembled a stick and use a number of the long, stiffened pieces to create 3D art. Not all students grasped the concept she was trying to impart.

"They had to learn to think in the abstract, which is difficult for sixth graders," she said. "They tend to think more representational."

Crowe said about a third of her students understood the lesson. The two finalist pieces on display in the multipurpose room -- one created by Sabrina Lowe and Brian Lee, the other made by Narayan Pathi and Matthew Tratos -- were tee-pee-like structures. The newspaper logs were held together by using hot glue guns.

"I'd tell other kids doing this to be careful because it really hurts to burn yourself," said Carley Sisolak, 11, a sixth-grader who had to change her design halfway through because the pieces were hard to secure.

Las Vegas Day School's art fair was held April 21-22. As children came into the multipurpose room to view items, they were met with music from the school's string orchestra, the jazz ensemble, a sax quintet and the flute choir.

Viewing the items included an English lesson. They had to fill out questionnaires about the various styles and media used.

Hayden Beers, 8, was asked what he would have students do if he were the art teacher.

"I'd have the kids do Picassos," he said. "I can do those, easy. You just put a nose up here" -- he pointed -- "and an ear right there and stuff. Picasso does naked ones, too. But they're gross."


<<--[back]