Artist Prompt: Meditations

At Dia, our education department works closely with artists. These artist-designed prompts encourage people of all ages to connect with their surroundings as they relate to the body and find ways to be creative within the home. 

Meditations
Designed by Diana Mangaser

Water Drawings
Fill a glass (or clear plastic) vessel with water.
Place the water vessel near a window on a flat surface like a table or shelf or floor.
Draw the vessel upon waking up.
Draw the vessel after lunch.
Draw the vessel at sunset.
Notice how the light passes through the water and onto the surface around it throughout the day.
Think about the temperature of the water as you draw. Is it warm? Cold? How would you express the feeling of the water in your drawing? 

On Roundness
Roundness is the measure of how closely the shape of something becomes a perfect circle.
Find as many round things as you can around your home (or on a walk or hike).
Arrange the round things from smallest to largest on a flat surface like a table or shelf or floor. 
Pick your favorite round thing and draw a picture of it.
Save the picture or give it to a friend. 

Food Palettes
Pick five foods with different shapes from your pantry or refrigerator (such as a piece of fusilli pasta, an edible leaf or vegetable, a piece of cheese, cracker, dried fruit, etc.).
Arrange the five food items on a plate.
Draw your plate and each piece of food on it as closely as possible to real-life size (one-to-one scale).
Repeat—this time, pick five foods with similar shapes.
Other variations—five foods with similar colors, five foods with similar sizes, five foods to make a whole meal.

Tip: An easy way to start is to first trace the outline of your plate onto the paper.


We would like to see your creations and add a selection of them to the blog. Please share images of your work by emailing submissions@diaart.org.

Diana Mangaser is an artist-architect whose work employs architectural processes to mine the potential of interstitial and situational spaces, shaping and inhabiting these gaps in the built environment. Mangaser is an artist educator at Dia Beacon, where she works with the Arts Education Program. She is based in Newburgh, New York, where she directs Artist-In-Vacancy, a program which situates artists and their work within vacant properties in the Newburgh Community Land Bank.