The Academic Events Group, 3rd WORLD CONFERENCE on DESIGN, ARTS AND EDUCATION

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Mondrian in The Middle East: Encouraging Ceramic Creativity In The Omani Educational Institutions
Badar Mohammed Almamari

Last modified: 2014-04-14

Abstract


In recent years in Oman, there has been an increasing interest in studying art and crafts with connection to the local culture perspectives. However, this major change is having a serious effect in the local schools of art and design because of that Omani students persist to connect the term of "culture" with the term of "heritage", and this connection has limited their designs, colors, motifs, decorations, patterns and also the purpose of art work negatively. Ceramic as one of areas of study in the department of art education at Sultan Qaboos University has been affected by what we can described as 'domination of extreme traditional themes' of art production excessively.  By using an experimental studio practice methodology conducted by ceramic studio's participants withen 4 months, the researcher has selected Piet Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism style to examine this subject because the selected artist  considered as the best example painter who presented 'simple elegant designs' and use only some 'pure primary colors , black and white, and straight lines', and that made his artistic philosophy more useful to be used in this experimental  research. In other words, Mondrian’s special artistic vision can be used as a measurement to detect students’ real creativity when they work without control in their studios experiments. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to examine the ability of  Omani ceramic students to use Mondrian's 'pure colors' and 'simple design' in their ceramic art in order to evaluate their ability to avoid traditional designs by analyzing their ceramic objects' outcomes.


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