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"My teaching philosophy allows, within a given framework, anyone to produce their own form of personal expression."

"I pushed them to think poetically about the landscape by getting them to think of different viewpoints for a landscape. For example, having them draw and cut forms that they think a bug might see from the bottom of the ground, through the leaves of grass or that a bird might see from the air.

I had them begin with a line to divide and break the space of the paper. This decision on how to break the pictorial space is important in a landscape, the horizon line being the most obvious division of sky and earth. I also had them try out other ways to divide the space of the picture: diagonals, verticals or triad divisions, an oval peephole, and a triangular composition that goes back into space as in perspective.

Participants were encouraged to make images of their cultural backgrounds, and they worked together to make a communal memory in a realistic group drawing and an abstract group collage. I then meditated on these ideas and made sketches and collages before completing a final, more personal drawing." --Rene' Joseph

Workshops were held for the purpose of involving the neighborhood in generating ideas for the mural. Members of the community were invited to express their ideas visually. In order for members of the community to communicate their wishes for the mural, three hands on workshops concentrated on basic art skills.

Focusing in on the elements of drawing and painting, workshop participants learned about landscape themes and forms, pictorial space and color interaction.

The workshops gave the artist insight into the neighborhood's concerns for the mural and encouraged a working relationship with people of all ages. Beginning with individual drawings, the workshops cumulated in a final group collage.

Poster annoucing design of mural.

Getting participants to think about images in a abstract way was an important objective for the workshops. One method used reproductions of master paintings. Projecting slides onto paper, the artist gave examples of ways to simplify looking at the structure of the paintings by redrawing the composition into divisions of space.

Participants then drew pictures from their memory and imagination of scenes that had meaning to them.

In another workshop, students could invent colors for use in the collage studies by mixing their own colors. Colors were based on adding each of the primaries and secondaries separately to white and then to black. They developed a sensitivity to color by seeing how each color changed when placed next to another color.