A painting by Masuram Ravikanth shows a young girl looking out of the car window. Beside the painting are interpretations by school students, trying to gauge what the girl is looking at and her thoughts at that moment.
A few steps away, a painting by Chandrashekhar shows a house and its reflection in the summer heat. Children are invited to share how the house would look if it were to depict a different season. We see their drawings juxtaposing the original, stripped off the warm yellow tones.
Elsewhere, students are given a blind contour challenge. They are required to recreate a Manish Sutar painting by gazing at the painting, not look down into the drawing board and draw without lifting their pencils. The children manage and the results are on display.
We get to see these and more interpretations by students at The Children’s Fine Art Gallery (a Daira initiative). The works on display are from last year’s art project. ‘Artful Thinking’ is an educative art project that aims to help children enquire about art, understand what the artist is trying to portray, critically evaluate a work and interpret it in their own way.
The educative project was mooted by Atika Amjad, who took up the ‘Art and Inquiry: Museum Teaching Strategies For Your Classroom’ programme at Museum of Modern Art, New York. “In Europe, children are initiated into art through the works of the great masters. I thought it would be good to give our children an opening into contemporary Indian art. We fall behind in art appreciation. Introduce them to art at a young age and they understand better,” reasons Atika.
A re-creation of a painting by school students
This academic year, the art project will reach out to Aurobindo International School, schools associated with Teach For India and other schools in APS (Affordable Private School) category. Atika is hopeful that 100 schools will be a part of this project. Modules will be handed over to schools to help children understand art.
At the gallery, a sample module featuring paintings of Thota Vaikuntam shows the plan of action. A painting by the veteran artist is accompanied by simple questions pertaining to the people in the painting, the colour scheme and thought bubbles for a hypothetical conversation between the characters. The interactive module helps children get an idea of people from rural Telangana portrayed in the painting.
The modules proposed for the academic year beginning June 2016 will feature works of Thota Vaikuntam, Thota Lakshminarayana, Masuram Ravikanth, Trigulla Murali, Basant Bhargav, Manish Sutar, Govind Biswas and Rajendra Kapse. At one corner of the gallery, we come across notes shared by students on their first visit to the gallery last summer. “We had a workshop last summer and many students were visiting an art gallery for the first time. We asked them to write what they observed here and how they felt being here.
Such exercises help children overcome awkwardness or being overawed by the gallery,” explains Atiya Amjad of Daira.
The display of select works of students from the previous year will continue till April 8 at The Children’s Fine Art Gallery, besides Daira, Road No. 5, Banjara Hills.
