Art seems to be only for the talented, but we are all talented. As the famous artist Pablo Picasso believed,
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up
Every child is born with some kind of innate sense of wonder, curiosity, passion and creativity. They have great untapped creative potential, but like seeds, each child’s unique talents need to be cultivated, encouraged and nurtured. Research has also shown that creative art is beneficial for a child’s overall development. It was for this reason that Ms. Shamy Low decided to start an art studio like Pandora Artisto Workshop, to share her ideas and cultivate the love for art in the younger generation.
Ms. Shamy Low, the owner of Pandora Artisto, has loved art since she was a child. She learned art since young and eventually went to DASEIN Academy of Art to study graphic design. While still a student at DASEIN, she had the opportunity to conduct replacement classes on behalf of her friend. She found that she enjoyed teaching young children very much and has never looked back. After graduating she joined an art studio as an art teacher and then she decided to move on to start her own art studio, aka Pandora Artisto. Now she has close to 10 years of experience in teaching art to young children.
At Pandora Artisto, Ms. Shamy focuses on teaching art and crafts herself. Children would paint, draw, sketch, hand craft, sculpt, design and explore using a wide variety of materials and techniques in class. According to her, it usually takes a month in advance for her to prepare and source for the materials to be used in class. For children below 7 years old, the duration of the class would be 1.5 hours long. Generally, she would keep the class size at a maximum of 15 so that she could patiently guide the students individually to encourage them to explore their creativity and imagination and express it through their art. “There is no good or bad art, it is just a matter of perception and preference.”
With smartphones and tablets being a big part of a child’s life now, and information just a click away on the internet, a child’s attention span is getting shorter by the day. Encountering students with short attention spans has been a big challenge for Ms. Shamy.
However, she said that art education is a good method to train them to focus on the task in front of them and she even allowed other older children to teach and guide their peers. She would group children of different ages in one class so that it would provide them with the opportunity to share their ideas with their peers while also creating healthy competition.
When there is healthy competition, children tend to work a little harder and slowly they would learn to focus more in class.
Ms. Shamy is an avid art lover. Her love for the arts extends beyond painting and crafts, and into music and performance art too. She had performed in musicals and theatres, and she had learned piano too when she was younger. So it came as no surprise that music classes such as piano and vocal lessons are also offered at Pandora Artisto, The piano teacher, Ms. Ai Lin Yong is a graduate from Berklee College of Music while the vocal teacher graduated from Paris. Piano lessons here are slightly different in that instead of classical piano, Ms. Ai Lin Yong teaches Jazz / contemporary piano.
Ms. Shamy described herself as lucky for being able to land such talented and highly qualified teachers at her studio. To share her love for music, she would organize concerts as often as possible for children to perform on stage. Did we mention there is a small concert hall upstairs of her art studio? It may be small but it is very well equipped with a high quality sound system and music instruments. Only recently they have completed a concert performance and it had been very well received by the parents. There is also a ‘jamming’ room equipped with guitar, keyboard and microphones, available for students to rent at a discounted rate where they are able to group a band to play music together.
It’s apparent that Ms. Shamy is very supportive of her students expressing themselves through art or music. She’s willing to go the extra mile to provide them opportunities to explore their interest and gain more exposure regarding art. She even has plans to organize an exhibition for her students to display their art for public appreciation and organize a public performance in a shopping mall for the music students.
The benefit of art education is endless, parents need to be aware that children are able to learn a lot more from graphic sources, more than just learning through text and numbers. Supporting a child’s creativity in preschool sets the stage to foster his or her continued development in the years beyond.
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