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ARGENTINA: In Children's Art, the Sky's Not Always Blue
By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Sep 14 , 2009 (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.
(END)
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