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By Rama K. Ramaswamy
This summer season, The Wellesley Community Center was home to an art workshop or “kid’s day camp for art” for the very first time. This program is the brainchild of Sprague School’s faculty member, Katilin Holzapfel. Holzapfel’s aim was to construct a half-day program for grade school students from this, one of Wellesley’s seven elementary schools - Sprague.
Over the past two weeks, Holzapfel’s K-5 students have been busy exploring the art of animation, practicing observational drawing, and painting “expressive, abstract works of art.” During the first week of summer art camp, students created dioramas and flexible figures from “sculpey” or clay before using technology to create “claymation videos” and GIFs. After completing their animations, students learned how to draw the human figure from life. They also learned to draw correct proportions of the human face by mathematically mapping out facial features. “In the end,” said Holzapfel, “it was time to get messy and expressive, so our young artists discussed modern artists, such as Paul Klee and Juan Miro, before creating their own non-objective masterpieces.”
Holzapfel hopes to see this program grow in the future based on its initial success. According to Stephen Beach, Executive Director, Wellesley Community Center, “the staff at the Wellesley Community Center has enjoyed these enthusiastic young ‘artists’ very much.” In addition, Beach made the following comments: “it is interesting to note that we have never hosted a children’s summer art program. It is a tribute to Kaitlin’s creative thinking and that is what we try to be about here at the Wellesley Community Center. We very much want this campus to be an extension of the Wellesley School District and we try to support student aged persons at every opportunity.” For more information about upcoming events at the Wellesley Community Center, please go to: http://www.wellesleycommunitycenter.org.
