Peet project inspires artists to look within

In Peet ninth grade art classes, students are creating a collage of things that they like or things that represent them out of magazine clippings, which they then painted.

The project has allowed students to be creative and make whatever they want out of their collage painting. There are many different themes and variations of topics that students chose to make their collage out of, which is what made the project more personal than other art projects.

“It’s similarly related to the machine heads [a former art project] where it has to do with personal interests, which I think keeps people more engaged. It also involves a couple other things like color, scale and proportion. It kind of builds on to what we did before,” Chad Wolf, Peet’s only art teacher, said.

He said one of the benefits is that “there’s a lot of things going on in students heads that I wouldn’t see, and it kind of points toward people’s interests in a different way in a visual form that you might not get in a personal conversation,” Wolf said, “so you can see what people are interested in when you see their choice of imagery. It’s nice to get to know students in that type of way.”

Although the students are still painting and using materials that they’ve heard of before, the project still gives them the chance to learn new things. “It gives you the opportunity to use different art materials on a different surface, and it deals with things in a similar way so your students are somewhat familiar, but it’s not the same thing.”

“I hid some stuff in my project that was meaningful to me. I hid my brother’s birthday in a dollar bill on my project. The quote [“Be proud of your body”] I put on my project also was powerful for me because it means a lot for me and is very inspiring. I plan to put it where I can see it so I can always have a nice little reminder. It’s just little things like that makes it personal, and that’s why I really enjoyed this project.” ­—Ashlyn Metcalf

“Everything in my collage has some specific meaning or represents an interest that I like or have, but the one thing that I put in my piece that could have a deep meaning would be my pink letters and the arrow that points to ME. If you think about it hard enough, you should sometimes put yourself first before others, whether it is mentally or physically. We all want to please others, but sometimes we need to please ourselves and point out that we are just as important as everyone else. I put it in my painting because it balances out what a lot of people including myself need to do, and that is to love themselves for who they are.” —Bailey Seegers