Fine Art on the Internet, Created by Local Students

In 2008, Fanwood resident Renee Collins searched for a job in the Scotch Plains-Fanwood School District with no luck. Amid the year’s economic meltdown, the recently certified teacher and former New York City art director was finding it impossible to become an art teacher.

That is, until one day, when Collins’ husband said to her, “If you want to teach art, why don’t you just teach art?”

So Collins did. She used her newly created basement art studio and opened a new art class for children. Now, her art instruction program, titled “Positive Space,” is home to about 30 students ranging from pre-schoolers to eighth-graders.

Among artists, “positive space” is lingo for the area within the artwork that the subject takes up. But in Collins’ basement studio, the phrase takes on a double-meaning, representing an environment conducive to a style of teaching that prompts students to think openly, become more well-rounded and experience creative growth.

“Positive space” also extends to the online community of teachers and student artists who are using Artsonia, a new website devoted to sharing student artwork – a community Collins and her students have recently joined.

Throughout Collins’ seasonal art classes, the students work on a variety of different creations. Collins said her two favorites are monoprinting and an Andy Warhol-inspired project. The former is a type of printmaking in which students print onto a plate quickly, allowing artists to be “very loose” in their designs, Collins said. She added that a “magical” moment results when the students pull paper off of their plate to reveal their artwork at the end.

The Warhol prints involve taking pictures of the students, blowing them up, raising the contrast, making them black and white, and then painting inside the faces using various bright colors.

The projects are certainly creative and exciting, but what helps make Collins’ program more unique is her decision to embrace the internet as a tool for her students and herself.

“I had seen Artsonia now and then,” Collins said, but wasn’t sold on it until she attended a presentation at an art teacher professional development conference. “I thought, ‘Wow, I have to do this.’”

Collins describes Artsonia as “an online, worldwide, children’s art museum.” Teachers post student artwork onto the site, and from there, options abound for parents, students and teachers to comment, share and even purchase the pieces.

“Parents can make a fan club, send links to grandparents, and everyone has access to the art they’ve been doing,” Collins said. “The students can comment on the art…they can title them. And everything is completely free.”

Artsonia generates revenue by selling merchandise printed with students’ artwork, such as mugs, binders, aprons and more. “I can put up anything and any parent, or grandparent, or friend of the family can go on anytime of the year, pick any artwork they like best, and print it on something,” Collins said. “I thought that was pretty amazing.”

The site also provides a worldwide community for budding artists to instantly interact – a true innovation for the art world.

“Every society ever, in history…has had art as a part of it,” Collins said – and not just “a thought-provoking finger-painting in a museum.” Rather, Collins said, art is also present in “folk art, maps, [and] written language.”

Innovative websites like Artsonia – and teachers like Collins who use them – might just help inspire the next generation of student artists.

Check out Positive Space's page on Artsonia by clicking here. To visit the program's website, click here, or check out its Facebook page here.