Day 09 (Puzzle Painting)

Workshop: Puzzle Painting (forth/last day)
Date: 20 December 2008
Time: 5-6.30pm
Participants: Chan Yun Sheng, Chong Jun Kiat, Lai Ming Xuan, Lim Jun Hong, Wong Kai Wei
Details: Puzzle Painting hopes to spice up the participants' creativity by asking questions - simple questions. To paint a puzzle, is to paint fragmented stories, whereby those fragments or anecdotes, can be integrated into a bigger or a more holistic story/scene. Unlike painting only a scene on a paper, this workshop manages to trigger the participants' creative thinking, to have them visualize what's beyond the paper, and what's next.

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Woosh-woosh! The last day to complete the puzzle.

The progression was alright. Effort spent...and being overly excited with water-based medium wasn't exactly a good thing - the mess at the end of the workshop, you know...

I hope all the participants still remember what they have learnt on the first two days. No more nagging, and here are the pictures:

Almost done.

Full concentration.

Getting busy.

Kai Wei requested me to take a picture of her with the puzzle before leaving, her brother Kah Lok on the left.

Can you recognize this animal?

Kai Wei enjoyed mixing different colours and nearly forgot about her task.

Ming Xuan told me that he saw eyes on the floor. I was a little worried at the beginning until he pointed this to me. That can be an art too - to see things around as something else, to imagine from simple shapes. (Those were the paint on the floor by accident if you wonder)

This group of participants was so egocentric that each of them (only the guys) wanted this cup of water to turn into the colour that they were painting with. They called it 'the World' because I made a necessity to put this cup at the center so that everybody can reach it. So the fights came when 'the World' changed its colour. It is a performative, interactive art that they were doing, despite unintentional.

According to the Theory of Cognitive Development by Jean Piaget, children around age of 7 are egocentric as they thought everybody thinks alike themselves. Don't you think these kids are just full of surprises?

Yup, the completed puzzle. Come and visit us during the exhibition for a clearer and closer view.

Aftermath of the 'World War of Colour'.

After the exhausting cleaning of the fast-drying acrylic, I packed and went back home around this time;

Some thoughts of mine:
The result might not be as interesting as the process (they might be too young to know how to control water-based medium), interestingly, if you get to witness their excitements; of how they enjoyed mixing colours (without knowing that they were actually wasting my acrylic - oh well), of how they created the mess, of how they learnt to paint water-based medium, of how they saw 'opportunities' to make fun/play with in almost every minute during the workshop, of how they argued with each other, of how impatient were them - this puzzle is nothing but the result, the documentation of all those brilliant 'performances'. And those 'performances' were important as those were part of their juvenile artistic learning process.