Author: Tammy Lane • First Posted: Friday, November 07, 2008

Gallery (click any photo to view the gallery)

Steven McCumber looks to his mom, Roslyn, for advice on his mosaic.

Steven, a second-grader, carefully selected scraps of colored paper to paste on his apple mosaic as his mother watched over his shoulder.

“It’s just awesome. I’m really impressed,” Roslyn McCumber said Thursday night at Lansdowne Elementary’s arts fair, where families and students gathered to enjoy artwork and music and to create small take-home projects like Steven’s.

Katie Watrous, the school’s PTA president, was instrumental in organizing the event.

“In the recent years we have not had a way to show or view the fantastic artwork created by our students for the Reflections contest,” she said. “This year we worked with the KidsArt Fair Company to have an arts fair in our cafeteria.”

About 100 pieces done in crayon, watercolor and oil pastel were matted, framed and displayed gallery-style. Families could buy the finished artwork if they chose. McCumber planned to take home Steven’s art, which featured a weave of blue and pink strips of paper decorated with stars, circles and squiggly lines.

Various hands-on stations from mosaics to origami were scattered around the cafeteria, and kids huddled at an artwork signing table using template cards to line up their signatures just so.

“She’s pumping the arts from every direction,” art teacher Peggy Wilson said of Watrous and her efforts with the fair.

The fourth-grade orchestra and the fifth-grade orchestra performed, and kindergarteners sang two songs during the 90-minute fair as parents, friends and others mingled.

“We wanted to try to cross the barriers between art and music … to incorporate a roundness of artwork,” Watrous explained.