Lauren Berg
Art as Teacher
High School
Hand printed greeting card sets
What's your spirit animal? Foundation art, grades 9 through 12. Students used individual Spirit Animals as subject matter for creating sets of greeting cards with matching envelope liners focusing on variety, texture, line and pattern. Artists wrote haikus, thank you notes or letters of support and reflected on the power of a handwritten note.
Building memory complexions with watercolor
What color is your memory? Honors painting, grades 10 through 12. Artists created mind maps in order to extract details from meaningful personal experiences. Through various exercises on value, color palette glazing and yupo play, artists developed their watercolor techniques in order to control the medium and build abstract paintings to represent their personal memories, using found knowledge of color amount, placement and relationships
Complex Figures
"We don't learn from our experiences, we learn from reflecting on our experiences" - John Dewey.
Honors drawing, grades 10 through 12. Students developed their skills in linear perspective, figure drawing and foreshortening through observational studies. Through research and visual analysis, students drew inspiration from historical or contemporary artworks. Colored pencil as a unique drawing medium was explored as students prepared for a final artwork. Informed by their preliminary research, sketches and discoveries over a 6 week process, students documented their growth on online process portfolios, writing reflective artists statements to supplement their finished works.
"Remove 3 lines so that you are left with only 3 squares." Keeping foundation art students off their phones and engaged until the bell.
“I like how Ms Bergs project was really hands on and I liked how she explained it really well and I actually understood what I was doing.”
MFA Boston field trip - Sketchbook Challenge
Observational drawing helps us stay present and notice what we would otherwise not see. I challenged students to fill up a sketchbook during a filed trip I planned to the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.
see Middle School work