Old masters and young minds

A local instructor blends lessons in art history and drawing technique, allowing her students to create their own styles.Gigi Valdes doesn’t just teach students at Harbor View Elementary School to draw like classic artists. She also encourages them to think like the masters.

Throughout the school year, Valdes leads after-school art classes for first- through sixth-graders, with each session lasting six weeks. During the sessions, the students look at works by three different artists and learn to produce works in their styles -- sometimes with other media included to aid the process.

Thursday afternoon, as students created collages in the style of American painter Stuart Davis, Valdes put on a tape of vintage jazz music, which she said had inspired a number of Davis’ images. As Dave Brubeck growled from the boombox in back, one student took the message to heart.

“I’m putting in a car and notes around it, like jazz is coming out the windows,” said Sabrina Alford, 8, a third-grader in the class.

Davis was the third artist the current class has studied. In the last five weeks, students created clay bowls in the style of Native American potter Lucy Lewis and made pastel drawings on fabric after Ukrainian artist Sonia Delaunay.

“I let them bring their own imagination into it, because they’re artists in their own right,” Valdes said.

Valdes, who teaches after-school art programs at Harbor View, Andersen Elementary and Peterson Elementary in Huntington Beach, turns her classes into a mix of art history and basic technique. On Thursday, before diving into Davis and bebop, Valdes taught a lesson in perspective to her students, showing them how to make a square into a three-dimensional cube on paper.

The perspective lesson tied in well with Davis’ work, which is often similar to Pablo Picasso’s in its use of solid colors and the juxtaposition of flat surfaces. Valdes had the class draw images on pattern and construction paper, which they would later mount on a larger sheet with upraised dots.

The students’ artistic mission was to create a cityscape in the Davis style, although Valdes recommended a few twists. Davis, who died in 1964, rarely put people in his paintings, whereas many students were happy to populate their scenes.

Second-grader Christopher Rybus, 7, had perhaps the most off-the-wall idea: filling his landscape with chickens rather than humans. It sounded like classic surrealism, but Christopher had a simple explanation.

“They taste good,” he explained.

* IN THE CLASSROOM is a weekly feature in which Daily Pilot education writer Michael Miller visits a campus in the Newport-Mesa area and writes about his experience.

20051108ipm0akkn(LA)20051108ipm09rknPHOTOS BY WENDI KAMINSKI / DAILY PILOT(LA)Kendra Elieff, 7, of Corona del Mar, works diligently on a project that her teacher, Gigi Valdes, designed for the after-school art class at Harbor View Elementary School on Thursday afternoon. Below, Allison Coatsworth, 7, takes art tools back to a table to continue working on her project.