Samantha rarely makes eye contact. She arrives in my workshop session all bright and cheery. But that optimism is more for the familiarity than for the art session. Children with disabilities have a difficult time when they have to deal with new faces, new places and strange scents. For Samantha, I am Teacher Lui, her art teacher every Friday. She points a finger at me and calls my name and starts getting hyper. This signals her playful mood.
This session is about capturing the lines of a Picasso face painting. When Samantha is moody and can not follow drawing instructions I create dots for her to connect. Samantha recognizes the image from the reference picture and starts connecting the dots excitedly. On other days, however, Samantha can follow verbal instructions and create portraits by combining shapes.
Samantha chooses the colors using oil pastels and writes Picasso's name underneath:
A younger 5-year-old student, Stella, does the same exercise using acrylic paints:
Stella has no disabilities which is why she was able to draw and paint the same figure simply by following verbal instructions from me.
Assemblage are perfect tools to interpret a painting by Matisse. Samantha did the objects on felt which I cut and which Samantha assembled on another board.
The exercise below is done using cut shapes on colored paper which Samantha assembles by looking at another work of Matisse:
For some children with disabilities, it is a great visual exercise to make them copy a picture of a painting.
This week we celebrate Autism Awareness week.
Awareness means acceptance.
'Disability' may also mean that some of us have different ways of doing things and to understand and be aware of these disabilities is a big step towards helping our PWDs.
The R word should not be banned.
R for mental retardation is a way of making people understand what our disability is and how they can help and allow us to cope with it. After all, even "normal" people have disabilities that needed understanding and support. And art is one of the best tools for people, with or without disabilities, to understand the world.
