Three Research Approaches on One Object

 Three Methods of Research:

1. Visual Inquiry and Written Description - What do I observe when I look closely? What do I already know about it?
2. Still Life Study - Contour, Blind contour, Value, Crosshatching 
3. Using the Object - Trying the object in a new way

Out of my three methods of research I found the drawing portion to be the most enjoyable. However, I felt like I gathered the most information about the object by looking closely and writing about it. What I initially thought would be a mostly visual research method turned out to engage multiple senses. This method of considering your senses can easily be used in the classroom. I have found that asking sense questions related to a painting helps students engage with the art on a deeper and more imaginative level. Incorporating the senses with a common object may help students develop a greater appreciation and respect for “things,” especially those things with which we create.

Emily Jean Hood & Amelia M. Kraehe illuminated the important relationships between artist and artmaking tool: 

“The concepts of thing-power and distributive agency offer new frameworks for    understanding the role of things in the context of artmaking and art education.    They offer new ways of looking at taken-for-granted things that surround us every    moment of every day. Not only that, but they help us understand that artmaking is    always a co-creative practice. It is always a collective action between animate and    inanimate things” (Hood & Kraehe, 2017). 

We do not conjure art from the ether. Rather, it is a complex interchange between the animate and the inanimate.