ARGENTINA: In Children's Art, the Sky's Not
Always Blue
By Marcela
Valente
BUENOS AIRES (IPS) - The young
students taught by Maruca, who has been
giving free painting classes to children in
a town in Argentina's pampas for the last 50
years, have won more than 1,000
international prizes for their artwork.
"The secret is to get the kids to work. We
just help orient them, and encourage their
enthusiasm, but the idea is not for them to
copy anyone else's work. We talk to them,
read them a story, and let them express
themselves freely," María Josefa Echave de
Carrozzi, known in the town of General
Villegas simply as Maruca, explained to IPS.
Her workshop, La Fragua, is open to kids
between the ages of three and 12, serving
around 320 a year now, divided into
different age groups. Since the project
began, some 4,500 children have taken part
in the art school.
General Villegas is nearly 500 km west of
the capital of Argentina at the northwestern
tip of the eastern province of Buenos Aires,
bordering the provinces of Santa Fe, Córdoba
and La Pampa, in the heart of the country's
fertile pampas grasslands.
"The children and grandchildren of former
students now attend the workshop. So do kids
from nearby towns, because it's easier to
get here now," Gabriela Saadi, who has a
degree in fine arts, told IPS. Saadi works
at La Fragua with support from the municipal
government, which began to help finance the
project a few years ago.
The project had a humble start. With just
five long boards for tables and 10 benches
that her husband gave her, Maruca began to
invite local children to a room in her
house, where she set up a workshop to give
free art classes in 1959.
"We just asked them each to bring a rag or
small piece of material, but if they forgot,
we gave them one," she says.
The project received few donations. Most of
the time, the workshop operated with
whatever materials Maruca and her husband
managed to scrounge up, making old brushes
last as long as possible, or making the long
trip to Buenos Aires to beg for paint
donations from factories.
"The idea was always for the kids to paint
using free expression, rather than copying.
And we gave them the materials. They were
never abundant, but we always managed to
find something, and we didn't charge any
money because we wanted it to be open to
everyone. The idea isn't to train artists,
but to improve the kids' education overall,"
she says.
Maruca says children don't always see the
sky as blue or the ground as green, and she
tries to help them express the entire
palette of colours in their imagination
before it fades.
Many of the best works, which are sent to
different children's art contests around the
world, have won prizes. Around 1,500 have
earned some sort of prize or mention, while
five have won first prizes in India, Spain,
the former Yugoslavia, Japan and Poland.
One of them, "Animals", took first prize in
1998 from Japan's Foreign Ministry in a
contest in which 250,000 entries from 75
countries competed. The winner,
four-year-old Victoria Inveninato, decided
to paint "a family of kitties" in her La
Fragua workshop painting.
At Shankar's International Children's
Competition in New Delhi, India, the
paintings from La Fragua are a fixture, and
often appear among the top entries sent in
from 130 countries.
"The collages are really popular in the
foreign contests," says Saadi.
People in General Villegas says Maruca
Carrozzi is an institution in the town. Many
remember the enthusiasm she transmitted,
encouraging them to finish their projects,
even if it took them several classes.
"I have wonderful memories of being one of
the first students, back in 1959, in the
workshop in front of the town square," María
del Carmen García recalled earlier this year
in a blog entry published in a General
Villegas newspaper.
"I'll never forget all the buckets of paint,
easels, paper and paintbrushes; they would
let us get all dirty and produce our little
paintings. Later my kids did it, and today
my grandchildren are. We all have the most
beautiful, colourful memories of our time at
La Fragua," says García. |
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