By Marie Pfeifer
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Morristown became an artists’ colony on Saturday. Make that a young artists’ colony.
Some 55 kids ages 6-13 participated in a Children’s Day of Art, rotating through workshops in cartooning, drama, eco-sculpture, music, poetry and pottery–with a lunchtime break to create “food art.”
Each session lasted about 45 minutes. Many of the youths wanted to stay longer.
“We joked a bit about this being ‘speed art.’ But wonderful things happened during those 45-minute classes,” said MG Kids Editor Sharon Sheridan, who ran the poetry sessions in addition to organizing the art day.
It was part of a two-week MG Kids Art Show by MorristownGreen.com and St. Peter’s that included more than 300 artworks by area students, a jazz concert, poetry night and an art walk. The Children’s Day of Art was made possible by donations from dozens of people who pledged about $5,500 via Kickstarter.org. There also was a $20 student fee for the daylong program, which ran smoothly thanks to 30 volunteers.
Ten-year-old Matthew Ellerthorpe experienced the potter’s wheel for the first time. “I made a beautiful vase for my Mom for Mother’s Day,” he said.
“Clay is my favorite art to work with, although I enjoy trying new art forms,” added Libby Owen, 12.
Photos by Paul Hausman. Please click icon below for captions.
The Rev. Janet Broderick, rector of St. Peter’s, led the pottery workshop. Before heeding the call to faith, she owned a pottery shop in New York’s East Village and sold special order items to Tiffany’s, Barneys and architects.
On Saturday she wanted young people to see her as a potter and not just as a priest. The Children’s Day of Art, she said, was about a different form of worship.
“The way children worship is by working with their hands, voices and what they see,” Broderick said.
Her experience working with clay is that it teaches patience. That virtue came in handy when a young pupil put the pedal to the metal on the pottery wheel, spraying brown clay all over the white walls of the church classroom!
Lunch was colorful, too, with Chef Melody McGinley Whitelaw of the Main Event and WOR Radio teaching kids how an artful presentation can add excitement to a meal. Rice cakes, cream cheese, cucumbers, carrot muffins and Fruit Loops were ingredients for some eye-popping creations. For one day at least, children had permission to play with their food.
In the church “undercroft,” MorristownGreen.com cartoonist Paul Laud demonstrated how a few well placed lines can convey a world of emotions. In no time, his rapt students were sketching superhero versions of themselves.
Solange DeSantis, who blogs about the theater, conducted drama classes that made the most of a limited props budget. With some imagination, children quickly transformed a humble ruler into a scissors, a doorstop, a sword, a golf club and a conductor’s baton, among other things.
A couple of classrooms away, Darryl Roland, the new music director at St. Peter’s, had kids singing with perfect pitch and posture, scoring points in a fun game that taught basics of sight-reading and vocal technique.
On the Great Lawn of St. Peter’s, artist Myndi Smithers set children loose with an array of household junk–everything from old computer screens to golf bags to plastic bottles and film canisters.
“I want you to learn how to make all this stuff come alive. Create a little town of creatures,” she instructed.
Soon the expansive lawn was covered with “eco-sculptures” of all shapes and sizes, an exhibition that should not be missed. One girl attached a cereal box to a computer monitor. What was that?
“A commercial for Fruit Loops!” she explained with a big grin.
Photos by Scott Schlosser and Kevin Coughlin. Please click icon for captions.
Sheridan, who spent months planning the Children’s Day of Art with St. Peter’s Assistant Rector Melissa Hall, said variety was the aim.
“One of the thoughts we had in structuring the day as we did was that we wanted to let children experience several different kinds of art. We wanted them to try things they might not have had the opportunity to try before and to discover new ways of expressing their creativity,” Sheridan said.
A future possibility is to let children choose their preferred activities, and offer longer classes, she said.
“I think the breadth of Saturday’s offerings was a plus, allowing children to experience everything from drama to pottery to poetry. I hope some of the discovered new talents they didn’t realize they had.”
Pottery seemed to be the universal favorite.
“If messiness correlates to fun, the extent of the cleanup the pottery room needed offers proof!” Sheridan said.
Everyone kept things clean in her poetry sessions. Sheridan said she was amazed at the depth and quality of the children’s poems. Like this one, composed after the class scampered around the lawn to burn off energy:
spring in morristown
sun is hot
a breeze
hot and cold mixed together
crazy people begging
trucks moving and honking
i smell gas from trucks
grass and air
screaming, running
out of breath
fall down.
Kevin Coughlin contributed to this report.
