Metheny’s art teacher, Cindy Whisman, submitted her ceramic piece “Sphere Vase” to the 2008 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, an awards program administered by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers that honors the creative talents of students across the nation. The Gold Key award signifies exceptional work and its winners are invited to New York City where their work is judged on a national level and they are honored at a national awards ceremony at Carnegie Hall. Metheny, her parents and Whisman made the trip to New York City in early June to attend the ceremony which featured notable guest speakers such as actress Kathy Bates, painter Phillip Pearlstein and singer/songwriter Mike Doughty. Culture and expanding her students’ worlds are big reasons why Whisman continues to submit her students’ works to the awards year after year.

Tags: awards, students, wood display easels, wood floor display easels

To help my students, I usually suggest getting a mat board, with the center cut out like it is ready to frame a painting, from a craft or framing shop to use as a framing square. Hold the framing square at arm’s length and look through it at an area you think you would like to paint. Try centering that interesting old tree in the middle of your framing square, then move the framing square so the tree is about 1/3 of the way from one edge or the other. Once you have decided on a composition, you can tape your framing square to a corner of your canvas or onto your easel.

Tags: paint, canvas, composition, framing

The half-hour shows incorporate art and history, bringing viewers to the places where famous landscape paintings were created and into the lives of the artists who created them. Connie Simmons, the show’s producer and director, says ever since she took a landscape painting class with Dunlop five years ago, she has wanted to bring his energetic teaching style to a wider audience. Simmons says she learned art from her grandmother, Altha Simmons, an artist who was based out of Pleasant Grove, an area of Dallas, but Connie Simmons’ career soon took her from her art. The crew traveled across Europe to such places as Provence, France, for a show on Vincent van Gogh, Giverny for a look at Claude Monet’s water lily garden and the northern French coast where Dunlop re-created the look of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s innovative compositions. In each show, Dunlop discusses the history of the artist’s work, brings the viewer to the site that inspired a famous painting, sets up his easel and materials at the scene, then re-creates the painting in the style of that artist by sharing techniques with the viewer and one of five students who accompanied Dunlop on his adventure.

Tags: teaching, art, wood floor display easels, dunlop