Advanced Studio Art Show Gives Proud Students a Chance to Show Off New Skills

After attending the Advanced Studio Art Show two years ago, Charlotte Boudin was awed by what she saw.

“If you had told me as a sixth grader that this was my art, I would have thought there was no way this was my work,” she said.

But Boudin was among the 54 eighth-grade students in Paul Gioacchini and Logan Krause’s Advanced Studio Art classes who proudly displayed items in their growing portfolios Thursday night in the Blue Mountain Middle School Commons.

There were charcoal and color pencil sketches and watercolor paintings, but the stars of the evening were acrylic paintings that incorporated motion elements using coding.

During the process, students were taught to use the program Makey Makey, which allowed them to use a circuit board to connect their artwork to a computer. They then used the coding program Scratch to make the paintings illuminate or create movement that changed the meaning of the work. To underscore how effectively those changes could alter the intended meaning of a piece of art, the students recreated familiar paintings or fairy tale characters.

“We wanted the students to think about how adding these elements sends a message or changes how an audience might perceive their artwork,” Gioacchini said.

Teaching transferrable skills is also a core tenant of the program, Gioacchini said. Not only do Advanced Studio Art students earn a half-credit toward their high school diplomas by completing the course, they also learn skills that apply to other aspects of their academic careers.

“Our teachers are great,” student Caitlyn McKee said. “They work magic.”

Of course, the students also learn valuable advanced art skills and techniques. Those allow them to produce a variety of pieces and form a portfolio, which helps to prepare them for high school art.

“This course gives us a good opportunity to explore art and experience things we wouldn’t have gotten to experience in our regular art classes,” student Harper Stevens said.

Those new skills were on display for parents and friends who attended the show, which was held prior to the winter chorus concert. Visitors not only observed and commented on the paintings and sketches, they were able to interact with the acrylics, using spoons as a conductor to trigger lights or movements that brought the paintings to life.

The students still have one exciting project to complete before the end of the semester. They are currently creating designs for the yearbook cover. The project doubles as an annual contest, with the winner not revealed (even to that student) until copies of the yearbook are distributed in June.