VSMS Students exchange artwork with students in Hungary.

4/15/2013 – The students at Jozsef Attilla Gimnazium (school) or JAG, Mako Hungary and Van Sickle Middle School got a glimpse into the world of the “teens” through their artistic creations that were shared across the Atlantic Ocean in an art exchange.

This project came about through the efforts of Jean-Paul Maitinsky, the 21st Century Global Connections Magnet Resource Teacher at Van Sickle while he and his wife were travelling in Eastern Europe, visiting the town where his father grew up in Hungary. In an effort to promote global communication and global citizenship among the students, Jean-Paul came up with the proposal for the cooperative project and within a few weeks, sixth, seventh and eighth grade classes from both VSMS and JAG created art works to exchange.

The students at the Jozsef Atilla Gimnazium “JAG” exchanged portraits with their American student friends. They have created these in the name of their cooperative project undertaking, “Identity Portraits”. The JAG teachers, Margit Havasi and Richard Marshal were glad to introduce the fresh arrivals to their students that reflected the diversity of the Springfield community. The portraits began with black and white photos that were made of the students who then turned them into portraits. Many students chose to collage images of famous personalities, food or sports into their portraits while many of the pictures point to their cultural and family background according to Van Sickle Middle School Art Teacher, Christine McNulty.

Another class concentrated on using anonymous portraits to study personalities. Some students choose to portray historical and/or contemporary figures or studied the ways and techniques used to represent hair, as an example, in which scratching techniques were used by some students for adding texture.

One Van Sickle student, Tarisha Gina, drew a grid then stripes and added a number of colors to the background. Then she added still more colors to denote energy to her picture, finishing it by adding pictures of famous musicians. “I am pointing at the people because I love them all and would like to be as colorful as them. In my pictures I introduce my world. ”she wrote.  As with many teenagers fame is important for Tharish. “I choose these pictures as they are important to my life. I am on the computer a lot and watch a lot of movies.”

The next step of the project was a mutual discussion and evaluation of the portraits, looking at specific art techniques and what feelings the portrait elicited or conveyed.  By the end of the school year students on both sides of the ocean had a much greater appreciation of the similarities and differences of teens from around the world.