 |
    |
| . |
 |
. |
|
Reprinted from Inside East Sacramento, June 2001
Teaching Kids to Paint KERRY VAN DYKE PAINTING IN THE PARK By Marybeth Bizjak It is a classic summer rite of passage for East Sac youngsters: taking Kerry Van Dyke's oil-pointing class in the Rose Garden at McKinley Park. Since she began holding the classes 12 years ago, Van Dyke has introduced close to 1,000 local children to landscape oil painting. The East Sac resident teaches the skills and techniques to create colorful, impressionistic paintings in oils. She takes a step-by-step approach, guiding her students through the painting process from holding a brush to putting the finishing touches on the canvas. At the end, each student goes home with a finished painting. "In school, unfortunately, art has been left up to kids," she says. "The attitude is: Stick something in their hands and maybe they'll create something." Students don't need special skills or artistic talent to take her class, says Van Dyke. "Everybody can learn," she says. "Painting is like reading: It's a skill. It comes more naturally to some than others, but anyone can do it." Van Dyke began teaching realistic drawing classes in a friend's home in 1986. When two of her students wanted to learn to paint, she took them to the Rose Garden. They had so much fun that she decided to expand the class. Now, Van Dyke teaches 14 summer art classes. In addition to the McKinley Park series, she teaches oil painting at William Land Park Pond and on the Miller Park riverbank and sketching at the Sacramento Zoo. The weeklong McKinley Park class meets for two hours each day. On the first day, Van Dyke sits the students on the grass outside the Rose Garden and teaches them how to choose a scene using a viewfinder. Then, they cover their canvas with a thin wash of paint so no white will show when the painting is done. "I call it åputting on the underwear,'" she laughs. Next, they outline their scene on the canvas with thick brush. Van Dyke tells them not to worry about the details but just plot the landmarks—trees, bushes, and benches—for later painting. Then, Van Dyke shows them how to wield the brush, dabbing and dotting in an impressionist style to fill in their picture. On the final day, they get to do the fun stuff: adding in the colorful flowers. Over the course of the week, the students transform empty canvases into beautiful works of art. "It doesn't start out looking so good, buy by the end it's great," says Van Dyke. "They learn that some things take a while. Painting is a process." Although the students all paint the same landscape, each piece is individual and unique. Go into any East Sac home with children and you're likely to find a Rose Garden Oil painting done under Van Dyke's tutelage. One local resident whose children took the class several times has 12 of them hanging in her dining room. Van Dyke looks forward to teaching this summer's crop of future artists. "I look at all children as little Monet's with the potential to do it all," she explains. "I'm here to show them how." Back to Art Classes |
||||
