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Life & Arts

Art workshop encourages imagination exploration

by GEORGE LUPERCIO
THE DAILY COUGAR

What do you get when 25 children have a paintbrush in their hand? You get young Picassos. 

This June, Blaffer Gallery will hold a Summer Arts Workshop that will allow children ages 6-12 to exercise their creativity with art.

The children will learn through artwork from the two current exhibitions, Urs Fischer's Mary Poppins and Tam Van Tran's Psychonaut. 

UH alumna Tina Kotrla will teach children the elements of art during the summer. 

Kotrla is an educator and a professional artist. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture and teaches art at Houston Community College.

Kotrla's classes will be non-traditional in terms that students will not use only acrylic or oil paints to paint landscapes and portraits. Creativity and imagination are the two ingredients that students will use to discover the inner artist inside them, Kotrla said. 

Kotrla uses everyday materials in her artworks, and her students will get the opportunity to use common materials to create their very own artworks. 

"I think art is incredibly important because so many things can be taught and learned through the fine arts," Kotrla said. "They can be a learning vehicle for math and science." 

Children who experience the fine arts at an early age show a greater interest in their surrounding environment, and children are more articulate and show a deeper interest in learning, Kotrla said.

The workshop's six lessons and classes are based on the two exhibits that deal with fantasy and reality. 

The first assignment, called the name game, will have students look at artwork from the Mary Poppins and Psychonaut exhibits without their respective titles. The students will create new titles for the works based on their observation. 

Students will also create animals called "fantanimals" using clay from Crayola that is similar to playdough, Kotrla said. 

They will also be able to create their own room using an empty shoebox. The students can create any type of room that they can think of, and they will decorate the interior and exterior of the room.

Another assignment will be creating scrolls of a Chinese landscape using beet juice, which Tam Van Tran made and used in his artworks. 

When the Summer Arts Workshop ends on July 26, Kotrla hopes that the students will have a broader understanding of art, "that it's just not oil paint on an easel; you can create art with just about anything."

Kotrla became interested in art during her senior year of high school, but she was an undergraduate when she knew she wanted to pursue art as a career.

The Summer Arts Workshop is open to children who want to think outside the box and explore their talents. Blaffer Gallery will hold the arts workshop from 9:30 a.m. to noon a.m. Wednesdays June 23-July 26.

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