Managing the Art Room: SCAMPER-An Artistic Problem-Solving Strategy

Visiting artists can infuse the art room with energy, curiosity, and new perspectives. That was certainly the case when Norfolk-based artist Chris Revels (@walkinghouses) taught back-to-back master classes to two sections of my classes. I invited him to engage my students in experiences devoted to personal symbols and to both polystyrene foam and squeeze-bottle freezer bag printmaking.

Though my students and I work with metaphors all the time, they haven’t necessarily developed a vocabulary of sophisticated personal symbols, and certainly not with Revels’ degree of facility. I quickly discovered during Revels’ visit that many students initially wanted to appropriate symbolic logos of favorite products, stylized depictions of objects related to preferred pastimes, and abstract patterns. While a day of experimenting in the studio with nothing finished and resolved to show for it might have been just fine with most of the students, it wasn’t fine with me.

A New Creative Challenge
I believe that experimenting, risk-taking, and working intuitively are important in the art-making process, but I also believe that skill-building, planning, research, and thoughtful problem-solving is just as important. While this experience had presented amazing opportunities for the former, I needed to plan for the latter.

Over the weekend, I toyed with several ideas before deciding to use students’ freezer bag prints as “prepared grounds” for a creative challenge I called, “I Am What I Am.” On top of those backgrounds, each student would develop and work with an abbreviated vocabulary of quickly derived personal symbols in three media: collage, stenciling, and contour line drawing with black permanent marker or opaque white pen.

The resulting work was rich, interesting, complex, and layered. It’s worth noting, that students wouldn’t have produced this level of work if they had not taken the master class or if I had not been forced to struggle with the question of what would come next at its conclusion. The ultimate results were close to my ideal balance of freedom and control, happenstance, and deliberation.

SCAMPER
Upon reflection, I realized that I had subconsciously relied on a deceptively simple problem-solving strategy that I had been taught years ago called SCAMPER. This acronym relates to how something—virtually anything in any field—can be manipulated to arrive at a better solution. SCAMPER stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Multiply/Magnify/Minimize, Put to Other Uses, Eliminate, and Reverse/Rearrange.

I also realized that I had used Combine, Adapt, and Put to Other Uses to especially good advantage. The challenge I created required students to combine in a composition three personal symbols—e.g., a fist, an airplane, and a jester hat—and three media: collage, stenciling, and contour drawing. It invited them to use the prints they had created in their master class as prepared grounds. And the task required them to modify their approach from largely experimental to largely measured and thought-out.

Taking Responsible Risks
If we ask our students to take responsible risks, there will be times, even when we thought we had planned adequately, when we find ourselves at a loss as to how to resolve an art-making challenge for our students. Among many other solutions are the two I have described.

First, employ SCAMPER in your strategizing. And second, when you find that, despite your best efforts, your students have created products that are suboptimal as standalone finished artworks, they can always be used as prepared grounds, and a very fertile ground, if you’ll pardon the pun, for new and exciting works of art to be built on.
In art, as in life, sometimes we don’t end up where we intended, but the place we come to can be just as good, if not better.