Arts Explorer #9: Gorilla Art

Gorilla art (also known as street art) is the concept of creating something and leaving it in public places to express (anonymously) your opinion.  Generally, gorilla art is done to spread positive energy through the community.  

A few years ago I was getting the mail out of my mail box when I came across a small piece of paper that had a picture of a smiling face and the words “Have a Happy Day”.  By looking at the writing and the technique of the drawing I was able to fathom that my four year old neighbour had made it for me.  I still have it in my room because it makes me smile.  Another thing that makes me smile is Spring.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the Winter and I love snow but towards the end of march (like most people living in Toronto) I am pretty sick of being freezing cold, so early this week when I spotted the first tulips in are garden beginning to poke through the soil I was ecstatic.  Both of these activities lead me to my Gorilla art idea.  Flowers!  I went on YouTube and found a video of how to make paper flowers.  Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0uIIzTXvFk (it was pretty easy actually)

What is perfect about these flowers is that they have an inside pocket like area that you can place messages into.  I wrote “Spring has Sprung! Be Happy!” on the inside of mine to remind people to appreciate and take joy from the simple things in life.  I then dropped them into random people’s mailboxes.  Because of this, I was not able to document how they were going to respond to my message but I thought it would probably be similar to how I responded to my “happy day” note.

Here is what my flowers turned out like and also how I placed them in people’s mail boxes:

 

ART WORD OF THE WEEK: The element of BALANCE

I thought that this activity was a perfect way to talk about balance.  Schirrmacher and Fox (2009) describe an object of being balanced once “the picture (or object) is said to have equilibrium or harmony” (p. 143).  The whole concept of creating these paper flowers was so that they would be symmetrical (the narrator of the video continued to say something similar to “we will do the exact same thing on the opposite side”.  The only way a paper could come out looking like a flower (and make people happy- I hope) is to make sure that it is completely balanced and looks the same on each side.