Los Gatos Students See That Creativity Can Take Many Forms

Who among us has stood at the ocean’s edge and not marveled at the carpet of tiny bubbles caressing our feet, or the patterned rivulets of retreating water along the soft sand?

Who among us has hiked through a forest and not marveled at the patterns formed by the leaves of forest ferns, or the myriad shapes and colors of fungi on rotting logs?

Who among us hasn’t pondered the processes of nature as we’re engulfed by it here in Northern California?

Since many of us spend our lives as much out in the open as inside, the answer is pretty much all of us have. But few of us have the talent or grit that are needed to translate all that inspiration into an original work that goes beyond an iPhone snapshot.

Students in the Los Gatos Union School District elementary schools learned about these artistic processes this March and April from two visiting local Bay Area guest artists. They presented their works at Blossom Hill, Daves Avenue, Lexington, and Louise Van Meter elementary schools thanks to the Art Docents of Los Gatos, which receives much of its funding through the Los Gatos Education Foundation (LGEF.)

Santa Cruz installation artist Jenni Ward has spent her professional career channeling the patterns, shapes and forms she observes in nature into her work, and she spent spent March 26 at Van Meter and April 1 at Blossom Hill explaining her process. Ward also brought in some of her smaller creations, as well as found objects from nature that inspire her — namely the bones and skeletal parts of sea birds, rats, whales, seals, seed pods, gnarly bits of bark, and rocks with holes in them, just to name a few items. The students loved the opportunity to touch and feel many of the unusual-looking parts.

Regarding the bones, Ward is inspired by their forms. “They’re so fascinating — they’re almost like sculptures,” she says, as she picks up a rat jaw, and runs her fingers over a tiny row of blackened teeth and slots the accompanying smooth, curved fang into the jaw’s front cavity. Skeletons and bones fascinate her for their twin attributes of strength and fragility.
The students at Blossom Hill and Van Meter learned about the concept of “installation art,” which is the idea that an individual can make an artistic statement at a specific location, and that that location is as important to the work of art as the piece itself.

Ward has created sculptures that she puts in creeks, on beaches, on boulders in the back country in Big Sur, in meadows, in woods — and even in a shipwreck in The Atlantic off the East Coast. In most cases, she places her pieces at a specific location in the way that she wants, takes a few photographs and videos, and then removes her works. She often repurposes those works for clients, galleries or museums who want them in their own indoor and outdoor spaces.

The first work she shared was an egg-shaped clay lattice inhabited by a red star. Ward showed a video of the sculpture perched atop a rock as water rushed by over the rock. The sculpture was inspired by the motion of water eroding rocks, and by Ward’s observation of objects in nature getting stuck between rocks in streams. As the students went on to see, negative spaces in the forms of holes and circles are a recurring theme in her work.

In another slide, Ward showed the students a sculpture of almost 200 pointy clay objects nested together in a circular flower shape on a forest floor. Again, the clay objects were hollow and had a lattice kind of structure since each one had holes cut into their surface.This was Ward’s interpretation, or abstract interpretation of a bee hive. She’d been hiking through that location, and had been stung by a bee.
Students saw over and over again how Ward interpreted various natural phenomena — rocks, bones, bubbles, plant growth patterns, and flowers in her own signature fashion.

For example, one piece featured a series of clay circles of various sizes (the biggest had a diameter of 30 inches) resting against each other on top of a boulder in the backcountry of Big Sur.

“I kept being inspired by circles because I kept seeing circles in the area,” Ward told the students. “There were circles from the tribes that were grinding acorns in the rocks there. There’s lichen that’s growing in circles on the rocks as well, and there’s tons and tons of woodpeckers there, and they will cover an entire tree with holes, and they shove acorns in the holes.”

One student asked her whether she would always work with circles.

“Yeah, probably,” Ward laughed. “I’ve always had a thing with circles. I’ve worked with them since I started.”

Earlier this Spring, Bay-Area-based French painter Fleur Spolidor spent March 18th at Daves Avenue Elementary School and the following day with students at Lexington Elementary School. The artist shared her “Alice” series of paintings with the kids. The series places Lewis Carroll’s Alice of “Alice in Wonderland” in surreal looking situations, like almost being swallowed by a shark, reading a book atop a giant tortoise, looking up at a giant orchid, or having her head replaced by a giant nautilus.

Picture courtesy of Fleur Spolidor.

Each of these paintings are symbols of the challenges of living in large, urban and complex areas like Silicon Valley and Paris, says the Paris-born

For example, the giant nautilus represents the heavy, numbing feeling of a weighty headache, she explained to the children.

“I wanted to paint someone at the end of the day when you’re tired and you have a bit of a headache,” she said. “Your head feels too big for your body, and your connection to the world is [attenuated.]”

Spolidor also got down to the brass tacks of creating her paintings. She showed the children how she keeps her oil paints moist so that they last for long periods of time on her palette. She showed them how she preps her canvas with a mixture of Gesso and flexible modeling paste, which she lets dry for days. Then she embarks on a multi-step process of adding layers of colors and faint shapes to the background of her paintings, which create a mottled effect. An integral part of her work is using recycled materials. She finds that incorporating them gives her an opportunity to discuss the impact our waste is having on the earth, and the ocean, a body of water that has inspired much of her work. Using Alice is a way to connect people universally to her subject matter, she says. Many students asked her how she gets her ideas. She said that she does a lot of research, but that she’s also inspired by conversations with her son, the news, and everyday life. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night with an idea and writes it down. An individual work can a month to three years to complete, depending on the piece.

Spolidor trained as a painter at university in Paris. She has lived in the Bay Area for the past decade, and recently moved back to Europe with her son and husband to live in Amsterdam.

While both artists’ approach to creating their works differ significantly, they both once again showed the students that inspiration can come from anywhere, and the possibilities for creative expression are infinite and often surprising. ###