#LiveArtHistory W1: Art is being human

Hello to my new art community, #LiveArtHistory: https://class.coursera.org/livearthistory-001/wiki/overview . I took Penn State's Introduction to Art (#artmooc – from http://lastrefugelmu.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/artmooc-introduction-to-art-concepts.html) last year and loved a course that had me making art. This course seemed to have a similar angle... so here I am! I want to learn more about art history and make something a bit like art. I also try to take everything I learn back into my own teaching - and blog about that. 

To make this class happen, we all need to be friendly, welcoming and helpful: make a Comment, 'like' a post, 'Reply' where possible. We are the course - we all need to make it happen.

For me - art is fundamental to being human, we are art. Many of us are taught at school that we cannot 'do' art - that we are not good enough - and it cuts us off from ourselves.  I found myself again after hearing someone talk about doing a daily water colour to de-stress - a meditation to start each day. I took my unused water colour box to work (a very stressful place) and started. Soon my walls were plastered with pix - and I discovered joy and a new confidence. I try to build artwork into all my teaching - and helped put on a small conference to help others do this also: 
http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/epacks/look_make_learn/

These are the pictures that Chris O’Reilly took of our artful day: https://plus.google.com/photos/111292261919257411213/albums/5974268028746180785 - and if you look at the very last couple – you can see that Raquel Duran, our Visual Scribe for the day, illustrated a bit of Tom Burns and my comment, ‘We’ve always been visual’ with an image of a cave painting. 

And that is art – the magical mystical boundary between us and what we see, hear, feel, believe, imagine, seek…
Art is not about money, big business, the stamp of approval from big collectors. 
Art is being human.