Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 6, 1993 TAG: 9302060054
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MELISSA DeVAUGHN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
BIG WHEELS IN ART WORLD
Those crazy art teachers at Blacksburg Middle School are at it again.Thursday, they laid out more than 120 of their sixth-graders on the practice field behind the school to form a human color wheel. Once complete, an airplane came zooming overhead to snap pictures of the color from above.
This land art may sound like a complicated project to complete. Not so, said art teachers Lynn Bustle and Linda Olin. Once they dreamed up the idea, it took only three weeks of planning to complete.
Each child was assigned a color - red, yellow and blue are the primary colors and green, purple and orange are secondary colors. A wheel with six sections was outlined on the field behind the school. Then the students practiced lying down on the ground in the appropriate section of the wheel.
The student on the innermost part of the wheel grabbed the legs of the student lying above him. The student in the second layer grabbed the legs of the student above him, forming a fan-like circle, complete with all six colors.
For simplicity's sake, tertiary colors - any combination of three or more colors - were left out of the wheel.
Then the students had to go about the task of finding a T-shirt to wear in their color.
Emily Carstensen, 11, was red. It was easy for her to find a red shirt - she borrowed her mother's sweat shirt.
"My color was really hard to find," said Andrew Martinson, 11, who was orange for the day. "We had to go shopping for it, and mom finally found it in Sears."
Heather Fillmore, 11, had no trouble with orange. She had an orange shirt at home. But Heather was assigned yellow in the color wheel.
"I had the orange shirt and my friend had a yellow one, so we traded," she said.
Principal Gary McCoy, in his first year at the school, said it "only took one introduction to realize just how crazy" these teachers are.
"I appreciate their enthusiasm," he said. "It's good to have teachers that are that enthused about what they do. . . . I think that's what gets kids excited about learning when you can do something different."
McCoy has become accustomed to Bustle's and Olin's inventive art projects. So when they came to him one day and said, "Gary, we need an airplane," he didn't bat an eye.
"I said, `Well, OK, I know a person with a plane.' I just tried to stay out of the way. They took it from there," McCoy said.
The teachers have a colorful past, so to speak. Last year, they decorated the entire art gallery at the top of the stairs with tropical rain forest creatures, plants and other colored paper creations - a project that brought the fire marshall to the school warning them to take the green paper off the walls.
This year, though, Bustle and Olin have outsmarted their watchdogs. They plan to create "Outer Space," covering the walls with non-flammable aluminum foil, the floors with foam rubber spray-painted green. The scene will be complete with its own spaceship, suspended in the air as it lands on the newly created planet.
They also are working on a project that will cover virtually an entire wall of the school office with red clay tiles, depicting Indian scenes. The leftover tiles will run down the hallway.
For Halloween the students made more than 100 clay pumpkins, complete with burning candles, and performed a pumpkin ceremony in the library.
When that wasn't enough, Olin collected real pumpkins and put them in her room, creating a pumpkin patch. The students then made monochromatic (one-color theme) drawings of the pumpkin patch.
Also for Halloween, Bustle dressed as Gumby and Olin dressed as "a very tired person."
Currently scattered throughout the school's art gallery are demonstrations of Pop Art - a decade of art in which everyday objects are transformed into another form, making them unusual and different.
From this era came artists like Andy Warhol. From this gallery come giant papier mache teeth, an abnormally large box of Crayolas - one student even took papier mache and bubble wrap to make a larger-than-life retainer, one of those metal things kids with braces wear.
And then there was "Mrs. Bustle's Neighborhood" containing miniature houses on a landscaped scene, and a depiction of Bustle's legs smack in the middle of the peaceful town.
This was part of the students' studies on architecture. A sign above the display read, "Can you say Architecture?"
But being crazy, such as lying on the ground in the shape of a color wheel, is part of learning about the unique aspects of art, Bustle said.
"That's the fun of it," she said. "The kids will remember this forever. They rose to the occasion."
Olin and Bustle are hoping this event will be written in history. They recently obtained the information they need to apply for a new category in the "Guinness Book of World Records."
"There is no color wheel, and no human color wheel," Bustle said. "They say starting a new category is tough but we'll try anyway."