Written by AFA Intern Mary Piscatella
Arts For All offers a wide variety of “Virtual Classroom” videos on their website to promote and teach numerous types of art ranging from literacy through the arts and poetry to physical drawings and dance. While exploring the site, I began watching the Virtual Classroom Series entitled Social Emotional Learning with Ciara Ruddock. In Ruddock’s first video, she describes ways to portray our personal emotions through colors and drawings to create an abstract piece of artwork in the end. The video began with a body scan, which is very similar to a meditation. While the viewer sits or lays down, keeping the video playing in the background, Ruddock leads the body scan, working from our feet to our heads. She makes the viewer aware of all aspects of their bodies, invoking different emotions as she flows from one body part to another. After gaining consciousness of our bodies, Ruddock taught us how to create a color wheel and asked us to describe how each color makes the viewer feel. For example, the color yellow makes me feel happy and bright while the color green makes me feel a sense of serenity. Next, the viewer is asked to write down their emotions around a blank sheet of paper and add a doodle to describe that emotion. Finally, it becomes time to create our own emotional abstract piece. In order to do so, on a blank piece of paper, we made marks all over it to depict how we feel. Then, we referred to our color wheel to fill in our lines and shapes with the colors we are feeling. It is recommended we go through the process with a friend and share our emotions.
I particularly enjoyed this lesson as it was guided and allowed me to become aware of my emotions and feelings. Emotions can be hard to describe, especially when we are feeling strong emotions like sadness, anger, stress, joy, or excitement. However, this activity allowed me to reflect on the root cause of each emotion, like how schoolwork may be stressful or how I am excited to visit my family members. It also felt very interesting to physically depict our emotions on paper using drawings and colors rather than through writing. Prior to the video lesson, I felt that emotions were an internal entity that could only be “seen” or felt through facial expressions. However, I learned that this is absolutely not the case. Emotions can absolutely be portrayed through artwork, and even allow us to reflect on why we are feeling the way we are. The use of abstract art also taught me that there is truly no “wrong” way to create art, and it does not have to make sense to anyone else but the artist. I absolutely loved this activity as it sparked so much creativity and allowed me to think outside the box.
You can watch Social Emotional Learning Series with Ciara Ruddock through Arts For All’s Virtual Classroom here or directly on YouTube here.
