A new year is a time to be serious – serious about the importance of art and in particular the visual arts in our lives. First, we have to understand “why art is part of life!” Art has existed in all civilizations. Through centuries, art has been produced in every culture and was a means of communication and self-expression in all cultures. It is important to learn how ‘visual art’ plays an active role in our lives each day and involves decisions we make.
Every day we make decisions that involve questions of style, taste, and design. Our environment influences us on how we make our decisions on which things to use. All of the objects that we use are created by people and are for the use of thousands of different things that represent part of our daily life. Do you realize this? All of the objects in our daily life have a deep effect on us. We see color, shape, lines, and textures in nature, buildings, streets, cars, homes, furniture, clothes, food, shoes, jewelry and all forms of visual art as well as performing arts.
Now, the objects we look at cause us to have opinions, beliefs, and attitudes about what is being produced. The production of objects being made by people have special characteristics expressed and some meaning. What we have to do is decide what meaning we get from these products produced. If we know how to evaluate products then we are using the relevance of elements of design in visual art. To have color, line, shape and texture be meaningful we need to have art education be part of our education.
The city of Santa Clarita needs to provide experiences in the visual arts to the members of the community to develop visual art abilities to think, feel, and express ideas and feelings of objects each community member sees every day. All of the arts develop individual appreciation of beauty around us. The city needs to create an art center and offer art education opportunities in different ways.
Jaylene Armstrong is a retired Art Teacher from Madison, Wisconsin, a former National Art Education Association Western Region Vice President and President of Wisconsin Art Education Association. For more information contact Jaylene at 661-255-3050.