THE PAINTED SUMMER: CLASSES TEACH YOUTHS ART TECHNIQUES

Ashley Jones of Jackson painted an ocean beach scene.

Julia Rodenas of Jackson showed her mixed-media magic garden.

Four young painters -- including John Free, 7, who donned an old blue dress shirt backward as a sort of painter's bib -- are daubing shades of azure tempera, filling in the sky in a landscape they had drawn in pencil.

Meanwhile, Julia Rodenas, 6, skips the easy part. She plunges into the minutiae.

Julia painstakingly touches a couple spots of color on the white paper. Then equally methodically, she drowns her brush in a small cup of water, removes it and repeatedly presses it against a brown paper towel, with a roll of her wrist making sure she dries all the fibers.

This continues -- a couple dabs of paint, a thorough cleaning of the brush -- until the water in her bowl is murky. She then makes a trip to the sink in the room on the first floor of the Art Building at Southeast Missouri State University. On tiptoes each time, every few moments she makes another sink visit to refresh her bowl.

Julia's unconventional approach -- and her obsessive artistic cleanliness -- persist until Beth Thomas, instructor of the Summer '98 Art Workshop for Kids, takes notice. Thomas then informs her charges that it's easier to start with the background.

Thomas also points out that the sky doesn't always look blue. So Julia stirs red tempera with white, and moments later her sky is a violent pink.

Asked how much fun she's having, Julia, an ebullient little girl with long brown hair, emphatically replied, ""Umm ... a hundred percent fun."

In the Art Building's basement, older painters are using the last day of the weeklong class sponsored by the Art Council of Southeast Missouri for experimentation. On the walls are works the seven 8- to 16-year-olds completed earlier in the week.

There's a painting of a faceless girl with flowing brown hair and flowing red dress gazing at the ocean from a cliff. There's a sunset over black terra firma. A dog resembling Lassie lying in grass beside a red ball. Three people in a gondola floating over a pastoral backdrop. A green-yellow-purple cube, also floating, in a cerulean sky.

"I like that you can paint whatever you want," says one artist, Susan Diebold, 13, while mood music lightly emanates from a stereo. "And no one will really say anything because it's what you did and it's your style of painting."

The older class' teacher, Brenda Seyer, speaks somewhat like Mr. Rogers of children's TV fame. A perfect picture of serenity, she describes why teaching youngsters art is a "dream job."

"I love the work students do," she says. "It's always expressive, it's fresh, it's alive and beautiful.

"I want them to feel good about what they do. I want them to feel like they are very capable people, and what they do is worthy of being exhibited and appreciated."

Which it will be. Each artist will display one work at Gallery 100 next month.

During the week, the students got a chance to work with materials, such as acrylics and watercolors and tissue paper, that they don't always encounter in art classes at school. They learned new techniques, toured the university's museum, studied about and met artists and explored different types of paintings.

"They're expressing themselves," said Thomas, who teaches a class to the younger children. "They're excited about the arts. These are the kids that will probably grow up to teach their children to appreciate art."

Said Seyer: "Some kids need things other than sports."

One of those youngsters is Cole Bradley, 8. He liked learning how to paint on glass because you can scratch off what you don't like.

And leave on what you like.

"You can look at what you've done," Cole said, "and say, `I did that.' You know? And be proud of yourself."