Creativity

by Delaynna Trim, Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art Curator

We are embarking on another year hopefully filled with art and creativity! Museum Selfie Day is Wednesday, January 15. Come by the museum and take a selfie with your favorite piece. Do you prefer paintings or 3D objects? Realism or impressionism?

Appropriately, January is also International Creativity month. Begin the new year with creativity. It is what makes life fun! 

As Kids Go by Sam Gilliam unframed

A fun and creative piece in the museum is As Kids Go by Sam Gilliam. He created a print,

then added texture and paint to the surface. There are lots of colors and shapes swirling about the center. Sam Gilliam was an abstract painter, sculptor, and art educator. While he was born in Mississippi, he lived most of his life in Washington DC.  He became well known in the 1960s for his drape paintings – large, unstretched canvas that he painted, then draped outside buildings or in galleries. In the 1970s he started working with several printmaking techniques. In the 1980s he experimented with angular, geometric canvases attached in a row and painted with bright acrylic paint. His artwork can be found in museums across the country.

Giving a Helping Hand by Ben Harjo

Another creative piece is by Absentee Shawnee and Seminole artist Benjamin Harjo Jr.  He takes more traditional Native American themes and ideas and adds bright color and fun shapes. Benjamin worked primarily with gouache, pen and ink, and a variety of printmaking methods. In Giving a Helping Hand, the body of the person is abstracted into a variety of shapes and colors, but we can differentiate the face and the prominent hand.

Kim Camp’s Good Morning Everybody! Sun’s Up and It’s Time

Good Morning by Kim Camp

for Toast and Coffee! really does wake you up!  Kim does not just paint on a surface, but creates a three-dimensional heart figure with legs that dangle from the chair that juts out from the canvas. The heart figure is reading a paper and drinking coffee from a straw. The use of bright colors, unexpected materials, and 3D elements makes even the grumpiest non-morning person smile. Kim is an Oklahoma City artist working in a variety of mediums.

Hopefully seeing a few bright, colorful, and creative pieces will get your creative juices flowing!

For videos on other creative crafts, check out www.mgmoa.org/art-projects/

Creative Collage

Supplies: paper, magazines, scissors, glue, paint

1. Find images or part of images that you like in the magazines and cut them out.

2. Create a collage of images that you like by gluing those cut out images onto the paper

3. Now add some colorful paint!