Grant brings art to elementary students

By Pat Sherman
UNION-TRIBUNE COMMUNITY NEWS WRITER

March 17, 2006

RANCHO PENASQUITOS – The still lifes of French painter Paul Cézanne.

The watercolor landscapes of local artist James Hubbell.

Jane LaFazio is exposing students at Los Peñasquitos Elementary School to the tools and techniques employed by master painters.

LaFazio gives art lessons at the school several days a week, through a grant funded by the school's PTA.

Last week, she showed slides of Cézanne's work to Carol Adams' third-graders. A small bowl of fruit was placed before each group of three students. After the lecture, students began to sketch the fruit.

LaFazio next offered students instruction on how to infuse their drawings with color, using oil pastels to capture the natural pigmentation of pears, oranges and apples.

“What colors do you see in the pear?” LaFazio asked. “Orangish-yellow? Red? A little bit of brown?

“You'll find that with the oil pastel the colors blend really well.”

Alyssa Dembrowski, 9, asked if blending yellow and orange would ruin the pastels.

“As an artist, I don't care,” LaFazio answered. “These are my tools, and I want to use them If they get too dirty, I can take a piece of scrap paper and rub it until I get to the yellow.”

LaFazaio started with fourth-and fifth-graders last fall. She is working her way to the lower grades, with a variety of lessons.

So far, third-graders have received presentations on the works of Leonardo da Vinci and New York artist Danny Gregory.

To help craft her curriculum, LaFazio consulted Gregory's “Everyday Matters,” a book filled with drawings and watercolors from the artist's copious journals.

Like Gregory, da Vinci used journals to record his preliminary sketches.

“I introduced it to the kids by first showing a picture of the Mona Lisa,” LaFazio said. “I say, 'Well, he didn't just start doing painting; he sketched first in his journal.' Then I show them overhead transparencies of pages from da Vinci's journal, with his writing and his sketches and his studies of the bone structure and his inventions. ... Then I show them pages from Danny Gregory, who sketches his dog and the inside of his medicine cabinet, tying the two together.”

Children were asked to bring in items to sketch.

“One little boy brought in a plastic action figure,” LaFazio said. “He sketched it in this fabulous detail.”

LaFazio sent a description of her lesson plan with photos of the students and their finished art to Gregory. He posted them on his Web site, www.dannygregory.com.

Nine-year-old Demetrius Dobynes said he has enjoyed LaFazio's lessons. He recalled an exercise in which she had the class do blind contour drawings of objects in the room.

“You just look at it, but don't look at your paper,” he said.

Adams, the third-graders' teacher, said that, aside from LaFazio's program, the students' exposure to fine art is limited.

“There's some kids that never really get to shine, and this (provides) an opportunity for those kids to be really creative,” Adams said.

“They all really love the class, especially the kids that are more creative and struggle academically.”