Chief Moses students learn to create art

MOSES LAKE — Jason Betts has no doubts that it is easier to teach kids who are self-motivated.

But then he had to think about it.

“It’s much easier, but it’s much harder too,” Betts said. “There are so many things going on.”

And there is a lot going on in Room 50 at Chief Moses Middle School during seventh period of a Thursday afternoon. Students, all of them eighth-graders, are busy painting, drawing, sketching, talking to each other and immersed in their own creations.

In fact, the work of Betts’ students hangs all over the walls, and even in a display case, in this wing of Chief Mo.

“I don’t really like painting, I more like sketching and stuff,” said Layla Lopez. “Faces. I like to draw people.”

Lopez is carefully painting different and sometimes clashing colors onto an image of a scotty dog, a process Betts calls fractioning. It’s based on cubism and involves flipping or inverting colors.

“This is one of my favorite classes,” she said.

Betts, who has been teaching art at Chief Mo for the last 16 years (and teaching here for 19 years) says the thing that strikes him most about these students is just how self-motivated they are.

“They are self-motivated, a lot of them. They’re creative, happy-go-lucky, and ready to be challenged,” he said.

These art students have been learning about perspective, laying out a grid on smaller pictures and then drawing bigger versions of those pictures.

“It’s a tool that they can use,” Betts said. “To frame things they are looking at. This turns out pretty good art.”

Right now, most of the class is working in pencil and watercolor. Later, Betts said, they will learn to use pastels, do a little pyrography — wood burning — and learn to make optical illusions.

Timothy Letsyk said it’s what he did as he drew out the scene from someone else’s painting of a log cabin in the woods that he was painting Thursday, a painting he’s been working on for about a week.

“Sometimes, if I don’t get time to work in class, I take it home. Mr. Betts lets us take things home if we need to,” he said.

“I like complicated pictures,” Letsyk said.

Maddi Pitts is busy sketching the front of a 1967 Chevrolet Impala. She likes sketching “mechanical stuff” and faces, and one of her works — the portrait of a girl — is displayed in the hallway.

“I just like drawing faces,” she said. “I started drawing it, it looked like my friend Kylie, so I just made it into her.”

Like a lot of the students in this class, Pitts has been drawing and painting since before she went to school.

“Ever since I could hold a pencil,” she said.

Betts said arts teach critical and creative thinking, something some kids have never really done in school until they got to his class.

“You can’t simply follow instructions, and some kids have a problem with that, they’ve never done it before,” Betts said.

But he describes his seventh-period art class as “a nice way to end every day.” In fact, Betts said he sometimes even has the opportunity to work on his own paintings in class.

“This group is so much fun to work with, and they want to do well,” Betts said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.