As this short week comes to a close, G8 students have just completed a unit on Surrealism and look forward to seeing their finished artworks on display soon in LC2. These works were created in a variety of media and highlight using creative thinking strategies to come up with novel ideas, from writing down strange dreams to using word generator sites to make nonsensical sentences.
The new unit has begun with an analysis of a famous 1970s movie poster, which students discovered was created by Saul Bass, one of the most legendary graphic designers of the 20th century. He was known for his ability to “symbolize and summarize,” or to distill a story down into its most basic elements and then represent those in one simple but powerful image. Because of this, Bass’ work is a great example of the principle of visual economy.
So far, students have done a few warm-up activities to get them thinking about how to communicate ideas visually. We have also started to look at some factual, conceptual, and debatable unit questions. What is propaganda, and what responsibilities do artists have to their audience? Eventually, this learning will help students to create their own persuasive posters!
