A day in the program: Light Painting

The Inspiration:

A year ago I was asked to come up with a lesson plan to explore art materials in unexpected ways. Few days before I had just visited the 9/11 memorial. Because the terrorist attack’s anniversary, the Tribute of Light was on that day, sheltering everyone like me, who felt the need of remembrance.

The Tribute of Light, view from outside the Oculus. Photograph by Jose Manuel Villanueva.

Such a powerful artistic statement, lightweight but omnipresent, made me reflect about the potential of light as an artistic source for self-expression.

Also inspired by the work of artists that use light as their main source material, like James Turrell‘s light landscapes and Xavi Bou‘s long exposures, I came up with a lesson to illustrate a poem using light as the main source.

James Turrell (L) and Xavi-Bou (R) works with light

To facilitate the activity, I chose Yehuda Amichai’s poem Some Lines Against the Light, a poem that has been haunting me for years ever since I read it on The New Yorker for the first time.

The How

Using Christmas lights, bike lights, sparklers or flash lights and a free app to capture long exposures, students explored bringing Amichai’s poem to a new dimension using a light source. Each student was assigned a line of the poem while asked to make her own interpretation with light.

The lesson ended with students recomposing the poem again, one image after another, and reading it against the new light painted generated images.