Half of Pinayrate´s painting diptych in progress
The Ocean Avenue Project was a two-semester-long, after-school course designed to allow students to investigate and apply art techniques and ideas within the framework of urban history and their surrounding neighborhood. Many of our projects, discussions and field trips were centered on understanding how artists use their creative skills to investigate and express their ideas about their relationships to objects and places. Beyond regular explorations of the Ingleside neighborhood that Ocean Avenue passes through, there were visits to museums, galleries, artist studios, parks, and landfills.
Ocean Avenue Project 1 began with introductory drawing and painting exercises. These evolved into more complex observational studies both indoors and out-of-doors, making paintings of simple 3D objects as well as making photos, drawings and paintings of neighborhood sights and histories. The culminating project for OAP 1 was a diptych painting, based on two aspects of how students saw Ocean Avenue, one being an observational study of something compelling and unique to the neighborhood, the revealing something new, unusual, imagined or mysterious about it.