Photo courtesy of Alison Sienwy
Growing up, school didn’t come easy for Alison Siewny.
“I wasn’t the best student. School was hard for me,” she says. “I wasn’t the best reader, I wasn’t really good at math and it was stressful for me. But what I did do well was art.”
Siewny picked up drawing, painting and then took up ceramics in college. Now, she tries her hand at any and every medium she feels like.
“My latest creative endeavor is photography, so I’ll be teaching photography at (Pickerington High School) North,” says Siewny. “I’m having a lot of fun getting reintroduced to photography. When I went to school, it was all film and now digital has really exploded. I’ll be teaching both digital and film.”
This year is Siewny’s seventh year teaching in the Pickerington Local School District. Originally from Bridgeport, Ohio, Siewny got her start teaching elementary school art in Belpre, Ohio, and has now taught numerous grade levels and ages both inside and out of school.
“I’ve done a lot of those guided painting lessons with adults,” says Siewny. “Somebody approached me about doing a class like that, so that’s when I really got into acrylic painting. … Probably my all-time favorite (medium) lately is acrylic paint. It’s not unusual, but I really love it.”
Siewny mentions acrylic painting isn’t unusual because she dabbles in some extremely unusual art media – even some many wouldn’t typically consider to be art. Atleast, not until they’ve seen what Siewny can do with it.
“There’s a project that I have done in the past with my middle school kids or upper elementary kids, which is printing on Jell-O,” says Siewny. “You put ink on gelatin and then you put found objects on it like leaves or flowers or lace, and then you lift that and then you put the paper down and you make a print with it. It’s really neat and the kids love it, so that’s fun to experiment with.”
Not all of Siewny’s creative projects are messy, but they’re all exciting to learn.
“When my kids were little, I needed something that was easy to clean up,” she says. “That’s when I got into knitting. It was something really easy and wasn’t messy and so that was a lot of fun. I’ve knitted sweaters and scarves and a guinea pig sweater for my daughter’s guinea pigs.”
Whether she’s knitting a sweater for a guinea pig or painting a commissioned art piece, Siewny follows her own creative process.
“Typically, I have an idea, a basic idea of what I need to do, or what I want to do, whether it’s a drawing of an animal or if it’s a painting of something, and then it flows from there,” she says.
Even when she has an idea in mind, though, her artwork often takes her on an unexpected journey. She recalls a graduate level drawing class she took in which she was assigned a self-portrait.
“I had an idea of what I wanted to do and, basically, it is still a self-portrait, but the way it turned out was a little different than what I imagined,” she says, laughing.
Instead of just using a penciled-in grid in the planning stages of the piece, Siewny decided to incorporate the method into the masterpiece.
“It’s a method that you can use to teach students on drawing portraits,” she says, “so I still wanted (the grid) to be there. I used the watercolor to just kind of paint the grid in the background, and then my portrait is overlaid on the grid.”
As an art teacher, Siewny recognizes the benefits of art, especially for students.
“Everybody has stress in their life and I’m not saying that creating art can’t be stressful – it can be,” says Siewny. “A lot of times it’s not easy, but what it does is it teaches students to walk through problems and to persevere through visual problems.”
She says art is good for the social-emotional wellness of students and allows them to succeed in a subject when perhaps they’re struggling in others. Above all, she says, creating art teaches life lessons.
“Bob Ross, he has the best advice ever,” she says, “which is, ‘There are no mistakes – only happy accidents.’ So, if you make a mistake, just keep going. If something doesn’t work, then you try it in a different way.”
Sarah Robinson is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
