Art Class For Senior Citizens

Summer of 2008, I spent a while in Fayetteville, Arkansas with family. My grandmother, who lives up there, is an artist who has her own gallery, teaches classes, and has a tv show. This summer she was busy with other things, so I volunteered to help out, and she let me teach some classes to a group of senior citizens, which was a great lesson in leadership, communication, and organization.

For the classes, I was responsible for organizing lessons, setting up and cleaning up supplies, picking out projects, creating/organizing warm-ups or exercises, and then actually lead/teach the class.

I led class for 4 weeks (5 days a week-so, 20 days total), an hour every day (2o hours), and I got to know so many wonderful people. I got to know one man really well-Rorey. Rorey was a architect who had made quite a name for himself, and had a loving family and a great life. However, he had a stroke, which impaired his ability to speak logically or write or draw at all. He came to the art classes to help regain some of his drawing abilities since that was what his life was once centered around. It was very interesting and moving to get to be there and help him through the difficult time, and see his improvement every step of the way.

I can't really include pictures of the class, because they weren't too enthusiastic about me taking pictures, but I can put up a few examples of the works we completed:

The ideas were to capture each persons' ideal landscape (left) and to portray a less refined weather piece (right).