Artasia at Green Venture

At Green Venture, the best way to describe the art environment is “controlled chaos”. There’s always a frenzy of activity and experimentation whenever a new material is brought out, and anything goes when it comes to the children’s final art pieces and what they end up putting on the page. Find a blackberry? That’s now an art material. A leaf? Already stuck to the page. It’s a great environment for children so young, and they always have fun with the activities. Amidst all of this chaos, there was one girl who had a very controlled approach to her pieces. We were working with bleeding tissue paper that week, which spreads colour when dabbled with a wet sponge, and, naturally, would bleed in ways that were uncontrollable. Yet despite this, she was able to get an even swath of colour all across the page, broken up only by her name which she wrote neatly in white crayon on each drawing. She was quite content doing this and made about 10, slowly warming up to it and trying new colour combinations and improving on her technique. However, after she finished her last one, she approached me with a smile on her face and asked if I had anything else creative to do. I had prepared a second activity which involved dripping acrylic into a container with a paper, then shaking a ball inside to create the pattern, and when I gave it to her, she went crazy in the best way possible! She had so much fun experimenting with different colour combinations, closing the lid, and shaking the container like a maraca until the page was filled with colour. Every time she finished shaking, she then finger-painted with the leftover acrylic. It was so different from the controlled and calm approach she had with the bleeding tissue, and it really felt like a reflection of how different materials can bring out different parts of the child’s creativity and motivate them in unique ways.

– Naseem Anvari