To think you are either good at art or your not?

[Vagaceratops]

You cant really teach yourself to be good at art?

DS has been put on report in Art class because he is achieving a level well below his expected level (He got a 3B and he is targetted a 5B which is never going to happen).

I have had email contact with his form tutor who is also head of art. She has assured me its nothing to do with his behaviour, but just the level he is assessed at.

I am sure he gets his art skills from me. I cant draw for toffee and neither can he sadly.

AIBU?

You can teach someone to be good at art. Skills can be taught, like perspective, (links to maths), colour mixing (links to science), proportion( maths again). what is more difficult to teach is the hand-eye coordination, but even that can be greatly improved if he is shown how to look. Has he tried betty edwards' 'Drawinfg on the Right side of the Brain'. It unlearns the 'thats what i think i see' part of your brain and teaches you to actually LOOK effectively. Utterly transformed my art skills, and opinion of what i am capable of.

That sounds mad Noble. Even with academic subjects, a child who is good at English could be hopeless at maths or science - or a child with a facility for languages could struggle with business studies.

I studied fine art a uni and yes it is definitely something you can be taught. Otherwise how could you teach it, same as drama and music? But to excel at it you usually need flair. I would also say the same about maths, IT and science - i cannot grasp some of these concepts at all. I could learn them if i spent ages and ages but i would never be a natural. Same as driving :(

A lot is practice and patience. I do life drawing and it took 5 years to get noses . Similarly some struggle with perspective.

Also when i was teaching it was marked on the persons ability and improvement, therefore someone with talent how put little effort in could produce something good but not up to their standard, but someone else could do something not so good but it be a massive improvement. Do you think this is what the teachers are judging on?

I am an Art teacher in a school which gets some of the best art results in the country. All students can be taught the basics of Art, just like the basics of any subject. All can achieve at a good level unless there are specifics. If I teach say 60 y7's a year probably about 2 of them would be a level 3. These are usually the one's who have either convinced themselves they can't do it, or their parents have told then they can't.

When they arrive at our school at the start of yr 7 most of them are stunned by what they can produce when they are taught properly. So it can be taught just like any other subject. Some may be better than others but it all can learn it.

If I had a student with a target of 5b ( usually taken from CAT scores) then I would be pretty concerned too. However I would only put them on report if I felt they weren't working hard enough . The art teacher in questiion probably has a pretty good idea of your dc's ability tbh.

There is a natural flair that some people have - some, like David Beckham, put in the required 10,000 hours or so and vecome exceptional in their field, some possibly never even discover their flair.
But you can learn the basic techniques and, to me, this is what art lessons should be about - as well as art appreciation and exercises to loosen up or develop the imagination.
My art gcse, over 30 years ago, consisted of copying things from mags while the art teachers had a fag in the store cupboard (true), so it's extremely depressing to hear it still goes on. I had the 'flair' and worked hard, and went on to achieve a degree in graphic design waste of time that was, which again involved minimal actual artistic skills. I've actually learned more about the technique and 'how to' of art through the classes I've taken over the last few years.

DS2 is in y7 and is getting a lot of negative comments from his art teacher about the quality of his work, which pisses me off because when I sit with him and make suggestions regarding technique, and explain how to look at the object and how to use marks to portray shape/light/shade, he produces perfectly respectable work. So why isn't she telling him this stuff?

DD has the 'flair,' but I'm quite relieved she's now dropped art as a subject, as is she, when she sees the endless hours of slog her friends spend to produce the unmitigated shite pieces for assessment.

I think an art lesson should be a pleasant experience at school - a chance for the skilled ones to get lost 'in the zone,' and the others to enjoy discovering their creativity - not get told to 'rub it out and start again, that's wrong.'

Oh, and Hobbitation, I'm curious about your illustration course - any chance you could pm me?

It is very very easy to teach art badly I think.....

I suppose there's a difference between being good at the technical side of drawing and actually being artistic. I know people who can paint very faithful reproductions of landscapes etc but to me their paintings don't have that imaginative flair or extra dimension that actually make them a piece of art.

"It is very very easy to teach art badly I think....."

oranges - it's easy to teach anything badly, but probably easier to get away with being crap when people believe that it can't be taught and that it doesn't matter.

Your school sounds great :)

Art was the bane of my life at school. My father still talks about the day he got a D for my homework - he is still peeved about it. It was the only homework my parents would ever do for me. they agreed you can't be taught it, and if you're crap (as I am)you're crap.

I am an art psychotherapist, in which art is a medium for self exploration. One of the first things clients say is "but I'm not good at art". In our field we feel very passionately that everyone is 'good' at art, and find it sad that from a young age we are taught that if you can't draw, for instance a house, that looks like a house, you are 'bad' at art. Nonsense. What makes art 'good' or 'bad'?

I find it very sad that we are taught that there is good and bad art, and we can be good or bad artists, when in fact there is just art and our relationship to it, our journey in it. For instance just because someone doesn't create something that is aesthetically pleasing, doesn't mean they can't enjoy or learn from it, relate to it and communicate with it. I feel very disheartened that art education often feeds this perception of good and bad art.

One of my colleagues actually asks clients to tell her their 'art story', as people often feel quite strongly towards art one way or another.

I'm with the others that say art can be taught. One of the hardest skills in art is the seeing rather than the doing e.g. your eyes are actually halfway down your head but most people draw them in the top third. Your feet are roughly the same length as from your wrist to your elbow so most people draw a person effectively standing on tiptoe (probably because you only see the front of your own foot when you look down).

Always, you've reminded me that I intend to discuss with DS's art teacher the fact that there is no right or wrong answer in art , and everything we produce has some merit, whether it's giving us pleasure from the process or peoducing a piece someone would pay good money to own.
< looks forward to parents' evening >

If the teacher expects him to achieve a level whatever, she needs to show him how to achieve a level whatever, rather than just say 'you are failing' if he can't do it all by himself.

I sympathise, haven't an artistic bone in my body and I'm sure my teachers never bothered to explain HOW to do this stuff. Same with PE, they just put some hurdles up and expected me to jump over them - how, exactly?!

ShotgunNotDoingThePans pleased to have helped. You are entirely right, children present their parent with a scribble and the child is so excited to show mum/dad, mum/dad is so proud of the child. Of course it doesn't look like anything, but the child can get great enjoyment/let off steam scribbling/learn about materials etc. There is so much more to art than aesthetics and it's about time the education system recognised this.

Sleigh bells, thank you. What I meant was this. It's very easy to start y7 with, say, decorating your art folder. But what are they learning. Nothing..They need to be taught about form and how tone shows the form of an object. How to develop ideas from objects in front of you and not crap on the Internet. That's what I meant.

Hey today we are going to draw Roman soldiers from imagination!!! Why? This is what one of my Y7's told me she had done in art at primary school! Another told me she was always allowed to use felt pen and do bubble writing in art! Ugh! Those things should be banned. Watching a kid who has spent years thinking they can't draw Romans etc, suddenly realise they can draw and at a good level is fantastic....and I am always extra nice to the weaker ones, I would never ever ignore them, I encourage them as much as possible....AND they respond

You sound fab, Oranges. DS2 was told his drawing was poor at primary, and to try harder at colouring neatly between the lines.

He also pointed out to me that only once, from joining the school in y3, to leaving in y6, had a piece of work dusplayed on the wall - but that's a whole other thread!

Colouring neatly between lines . The basis of all crap art education. Nothing has an outline, so why colour inside it?

The thing about art at school is it isn't about the end result.

Its about showing a progression and development of a project and a series or ideas.

I was predicted an A at A Level. My skills were good. But my downfall was the fact that I could come up with an idea and a painting just like that. I didn't need to do hundreds of drawings to slowly show a range of ideas and a progression towards an ultimate project which incorporated the best of them. I found it a frustrating and pointless process which took all the soul out of it.

And given I became a graphic designer in a busy printers where you have enough time to have only a couple of ideas, it proved to be a completely useless process.

I can see the point of it to a degree, but I'm not convinced of the way its marked.

So, I can see what they are teaching - project progression - which doesn't need the same natural traditional idea of talent; just ideas. You can be 'shit' at art but still get good grades if you do all the work behind it, and have ideas. If you can learn skills to help that (which I think you can) all the better.

So if someone is predicted a grade and they get one far lower, then I would say that the problem is they aren't putting in the effort more than lacking talent. They wouldn't have been predicted a higher grade otherwise, if it was graded on old fashioned talent.

I may not have even the remotest spark of talent for the visual art but I hear what you say, Red - only with me it was maths! I had an innate grasp of maths, I could just almost taste the answer - what put me off was all that boring 'having to show your workings out'.

I gave up maths after O-level and only realised it does get creative later on years afterwards, when my career took an unexpected twist. Such a shame, in retrospect I think I'd have really enjoyed heading in that direction.

God how I loved art at school. I can't draw for toffee but it got me out of taking a subject I would hate and for that reason I shall always hold art close to my heart.

My favourite part of art was experimenting never the end result of experimenting, that normally went in the bin before too many people could mock me

I think most things can be taught (assuming no specific learning difficulty e.g. dyslexia). You can't teach somebody to be Van Gogh/Mozart/Roger Federer, but with enough hard work and the right teacher, I think pretty much anyone could produce a reasonable piece of art, play a musical instrument so it is pleasant for the audience, play a reasonable game of tennis etc. etc.

On the other hand, I have no clue what all this 5B 3B stuff is all about.

I disagree, I'm good at art, but naturally shit at languages, I still had to make the effort to pass my french o' level. An adequate standard of art an be achieved by hard work, the same as any other subject.

I'd not be happy with that either op.

I can't draw to save my life, and neither can dd2. Dd1 however, is brilliant at art, and currently doing well in her art GCSE.

No idea, where she gets it from, cos xp is rubbish at it too.