Five fingers are on one hand and with this hand children can be creative and create works of art, free to use whatever their imagination spurs them on. Actually they do it with both hands, five fingers twice. The motto of the youth art school “School of Fantasy Gräfelfing” is derived from this: “Get a picture of the world with both hands!” So the number five sets the pace in the creative workshop.
The Graefelfing School of Imagination has existed for more than 30 years. Lilli Plodeck is the founder and has become the face of the school over the past three decades. Afternoon after afternoon, in a paint-splattered apron, in the basement of the elementary school, in the workshops of the art school, she gives children impulses for creative work, together with her colleagues. There is cooperation with schools in the municipality and time and again the art students take part in regional activities in the public space – making the creativity of the children visible is Plodeck’s concern. That’s why she’s pretty proud of the first prize that the school just received in a team with six other Bavarian art schools in the state association of youth art schools (LJKE) in the national competition “Get out! The youth art school effect”. The Gräfelfingen contribution was about children’s wishes for politicians, which they expressed artistically by means of a poster painting campaign on the station square.
The Christmas workshop, in which the children have been working towards the 24th of December week by week since the beginning of December, is led by Plodeck with Luzi Gross. Leporellos with five pages are currently being produced. The number five is just right for telling a little story, four pages would not be enough, six might be too many. If you open the finished leporello, the individual pages add up to the overall picture. Every child, in the workshop they are between seven and ten years old, stamps the blank pages with birds, mountain peaks, trees, waves, owls, castles or palaces, a whole box of motifs is ready. “The stamps stimulate the imagination,” says Plodeck, and it’s not long before the kids start adding balloons with text to the birds, pressing their fingers into the ink pad to print fingertip paths through a densely stamped forest, and to use the “colour buffet”, as Plodeck calls it, in order to connect the stamp motifs to stories with colored pencils and chalk.
In the last Christmas workshop before Christmas Eve, the big packing of the works of art takes place. Bags are also artistically designed for this. And then the children put their works under the Christmas tree at home and as a viewer you become jealous: if only you had such creative homemade gifts ready.
In the series “My number” the SZ presents people every day until Christmas, in whose life a number has a special meaning – from 1 to 24 like in an advent calendar.