Painting with Hand, Head and Heart: A Natural Approach to Learning the Art of Painting

Description

Painting with Hand, Head, and Heart is a comprehensive and practical guide to the art of paintingand to the process of visual thinking that is part of our full human intelligence. More than 500 illustratedexercises and examples, collected and developed over many years of Waldorf classroom experience, showteachers, parents, and students how to learn to paint simply and naturally, as a child would learn to paint.The introduction examines contemporary research on brain development and its relationship to learning,showing how the process of picture-making contributes to the development of visual thinking. An overviewfollows of how children learn to paint, and how their visual intelligence can be engaged through age-appropriatecolor exercises. Many useful examples of wet-on-wet watercolor, wet-on-dry veil painting, pastel, acrylic and other mediums illustrate the art and science of painting for students of all ages and ability levels. Landscape, portrait, still life, figure painting and abstraction are dealt with as well as insights into Rudolf Steiner's indications on painting. Van James alsoprovides samples of inspiring blackboard drawings and main lesson book pages for teachers and students. Heincludes an informative chapter on lazure wall painting and mural techniques, two contributions on therapeutic painting, an appendix on color poems and verses, and a bibliography of resources. Quotations by artists and authors on art, painting and color are generously included throughout the book.

Van James is a teaching artist, writer, illustrator, photographer, international arts educator, and editor of Pacifica Journal. He is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute (US), Emerson College (UK), and the Goetheanum (CH). His paintings have beenexhibited in Europe, America and Asia, and are found in many private collections. He was the head of the art department at the Honolulu Waldorf School for three decades and is on the council of the Anthroposophical Society in Hawai'i and the Visual Arts Section of North America. He is anaward-winning author of a series of cultural guidebooks and his writing on the arts includes: Spirit and Art: Pictures of the Transformation of Consciousness, The Secret Language of Form: Visual Meaning in Art and Nature, and Drawing with Hand, Head and Heart: A Natural Approach to Learning the Art of Drawing. He lives in Hawai'i and travels widely as an advocate for the art