Pattern Vision and Kids' Minds

Susie Monday

Artist, maker, teacher, author, head cook and bottlewasher.

The art I make is the result of a life-long love of pattern, texture and color. How I teach is a skill honed by experience (I started teaching creative arts to younger kids when I was 12). After earning a B.A. in Studio Arts from Trinity University, I helped lead an internationally recognized educational foundation, designed curriculum exhibits for schools and other institutions, wrote and edited for a major daily newspaper, opened the San Antonio Children's Museum and then, a dozen years ago, took the scary but essential (for me) leap to become a fulltime artist and art teacher.

About This Blog

This weblog is about the maker's life. The teacher's path. The stitching and dyeing and printing of the craft of art cloth and art quilt. The stumbling around and the soaring, the way the words and the pictures come together. Poetry on the page and in the piecing of bright scraps together. The inner work and the outer journeys to and from. Practicalities and flights of fancy and fearful grandeur, trivial pursuits and tactile amusements. Expect new postings two or three times a week, unless you hear otherwise.

To reach me, leave a comment after a post, OR email me at susiemonday@gmail.com

Tweets by @susiemonday Tweets by @susiemonday

To receive a notice of new posts in your email, scroll down this column to the end of the page and subscribe via FEEDBLITZ or add this blog to your own subscription service. You can search the blog with any phrase or word, by typing it into the seach window below:

Subscribe .. Or Write Me!

Wednesday

Mar272013

Wednesday, March 27, 2013 at 12:40PM

This week's post on BrainPickings today is wonderful -- Maria Popova does her review and reveal about kids and design mind!

Like Steve Jobs, who famously proclaimed that "creativity is just connecting things," and Paula Scher, who likens creativity to a slot machine, and like other theorists of creative problem-solving, Kinchin emphasized this inherent pattern-recognition gift of the child mind, also manifested in the most impactful design for children:

Designers, like children, find patterns and make connections. The importance of pattern making and creative play with material things, for children and adults, as a route to understanding spatial relations and problem-solving, as well as creating a sense of the individual in relation to larger cosmic harmonies, comes up again and again in the twentieth century.

This new book and this thought particularly scaffold another piece of reinforcment for the ideas we talk about in our book The Missing Alphabet, The Parents' Guide to Developing Creative Thinking in Kids.

PS: Here's a wonderful site with work by artist/illustrator Gulia Orrachia shared by my friend (also a fiber artist) Diana: http://www.patternprintsjournal.com/2013/03/textures-and-patterns-into-lively.html

And another great page in that inspiring blog! http://www.patternprintsjournal.com/2012/07/patterns-and-decoration-in-amazing-book.html

Susie Monday |

Reader Comments

There are no comments for this journal entry. To create a new comment, use the form below.

Post a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

My response is on my own website »

Author:

Author Email (optional):

Author URL (optional):

Post:

↓ | ↑

All HTML will be escaped. Hyperlinks will be created for URLs automatically.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.