COVID-19 Homeschool, Day 14

Yesterday's relaxed day was so much fun that we're going to stay a little more relaxed again today. I'm sure that many of you have seen links to the various recreations of famous paintings that people have been doing with stuff they have around the house. Well, I happen to still have my college textbook from that art appreciation course I took (and loved, incidentally), so I'm challenging my children to recreate some of the paintings depicted in said textbook. Here are the results.

Now, this may seem like silliness and frivolity, but there is actually a lot to be learned here. What are the crucial parts of the painting? What can we learn about the composition, the angles, the colors, the layout? How do the lines force the viewer to focus on a certain element? How minimal can we get and still capture the "spirit" of the painting? What aspects are most important to recreate - and why?

Here's how our schedule worked out.

7:30-9am: My son was awake for quite a while in the middle of the night, so he slept fairly late this morning. So we pushed back our usual start time, having a leisurely breakfast (well, those who got up at close to our usual time did), then getting brushed and washed and dressed.

9-9:15am: We finished up our palm branches from yesterday. We had used watercolor paints so we had to leave them to dry before cutting them out and painting the other side today.

9:15-10am: We looked through my college art textbook, "What Is Art?" by John Canaday, and I asked them each to pick out a painting or sculpture that they particularly liked, and we talked about what parts of it caught our eye. My son chose one of my personal favorite paintings, Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait:

I asked each of them to list 3 or 4 things that would be most important to keep if you were going to simplify the image. We all agreed that the bright green of the dress was crucial, as well as the two people, the dog, and either the mirror or the chandelier. We discussed the symbols of the painting and the historical context, how the mirror makes the viewer him- or herself a witness to the marriage; how the woman is cradling her pregnant belly to emphasize rather than to hide it; how the dog symbolizes fidelity and faithfulness and the sandals symbolize an oath or a contract. We talked about how the mirror and the chandelier fill in the space above the curve of the couple's clasped hands, and how the window and the curtains form vertical lines on each side that balance each other. I showed them this funny reenactment of the same painting:

They made sure to include the same details that we thought were important!

My daughter chose da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which she had seen in school and is fascinated by.

They were eager to move on to their own artwork, so we didn't discuss that one in much depth.

10-11am: I asked each of them to choose a painting or sculpture that they thought they could recreate, either using objects around the house and taking a photograph, or making and actual drawing or painting. Not surprisingly, my daughter chose to paint her own version of the Mona Lisa (she has one advantage that da Vinci did not: the ability to speed paint drying using a hair dryer!):

My son chose to recreate Albrecht Durer's famous Study of Praying Hands print using his own hands and a white dress shirt:

And since that didn't take very long, he moved on to engineer this bottle rack that he found in my art book:

It's more engineering than art, which is exactly what I would expect of him.

The artists with their final creations!

11-11:30am: Free art. I let them do anything artistic that they wanted. My daughter wanted to finger paint; my son was still working on his sculpture. While they both worked, I read them one of my favorite passages from Gregory Maguire's take on the Cinderella story, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. It describes a young girl's first drawing lesson, when her master assigns her to draw a complicated shell. She has no idea how to begin until her master's other assistant has her squint at the shell until it is just a blur, then imagine she has to draw the most important two lines of its shape - two strokes of the pen to represent the entire shell! She is frustrated and annoyed and even angry, but she finally does it, and, in Maguire's words, "It is a joke of a seashell, an abomination of a seashell, a curse of a seashell. It is still a seashell."

Once my son finished his sculpture, we agreed that music was a form of art and he played around on the recorder and piano for a bit, then played on a music composition website.

11:30am-1pm: Lunch break and free time.

1-2pm: My daughter's class is having a session on Google Meet, but for some reason we can't get the sound to work, so we just left the meeting and I'm having her continue reading "Peter Pan" on her own. My son's teacher gave him some new assignments on his Google Classroom, so he's working through those, starting with math (one of his favorites). When my daughter finished reading, we went back to her Google Classroom to see if there were more assignments. She read some poetry that her teacher had posted in honor of National Poetry Month, then she practiced her multiplication facts with flashcards.

2-2:30pm: We have a great board game called Sum Swamp that the kids have been dying to play for a couple of days. We hadn't been able to find it, but this morning when we were doing art we found it stacked with a few boxes of art supplies that were the same size. So I promised they could play it as a treat at the end of the day!


And that was our day! Whew. I'm going to go take a nap before I tackle dinner. Even today, I've earned it.

Photo A Day, Day 30: Something Silly

Rainy days can go either way in my house: whiny, cabin-fevered children getting into fights and complaining they’re bored, or happy children enjoying the chance to do inside projects. Today, thank goodness, turned out to be the latter. We started the day with a play date at home with some friends, the kids all chasing each other around and wrestling (yes, even Katie) to burn off energy, but once our friends left, the kids were impressively mellow and asking for an art project.

My son has discovered a fun concept called “Artzooka,” which is basically making things out of found and recycled objects from around the house. We’ve made jet packs for stuffed animals out of empty water bottles, rubber bands, and tissue paper; we’ve made pinwheels out of construction paper and straws; we’ve made interesting but indescribable sculptures from broken toys and scotch tape. And today, we made a minecraft helmet out of an empty baby wipes box, construction paper, and magic markers.

You can’t see it in this photo, but there is a big smile hiding behind that swath of cardboard. And there were lots of silly noises coming from inside it. And I have no doubt there will be lots more silliness coming from both inside and around that helmet for the rest of the afternoon.

What better way to spend a rainy afternoon than by doing something silly?

If You Must Sin, Sin Boldly

When I was in college, I performed in a symphonic band under a conductor who often told his players, “If you must sin, sin boldly.” We usually heard it while rehearsing a new piece, when a particular section or performer would make a tentative entrance, unsure of an unfamiliar melody or harmony or rhythm. We were inevitably scolded for being hesitant, whether the notes we were playing were right or wrong. The conductor preferred that we play a wrong note confidently than to sneak in, unnoticed, while playing the correct part.

I find that adage to be applicable to many creative endeavors. You might not be 100% sure of what you are doing, but it’s better to throw yourself into it, heart and soul, and fail, than it is to hold back, give less than your all, and kind-of-sort-of-succeed. Creativity by its nature involves risk. For every spectacular success there are dozens of spectacular failures. But what’s much worse is that for every spectacular success, there are hundreds of dull, hesitant, half-hearted, could-have-been successes.

Because of the fear of failure, I was often one of the players in the band sneaking in on my part, hoping to stay unnoticed. I was willing to pass up a chance to be noticed for my skill in favor of hiding my mistakes. That’s not the best way to express creativity. Fortunately, my son has apparently not inherited my fear of creative failure. He thinks outside the box in many ways. Possibly, being only 3, it’s because he’s not entirely aware of the box. But I love how unlimited his imagination is.

For example, he has a game made up of different colored, different length wooden blocks. There is a deck of cards showing various arrangements of the blocks, and the players try to copy each pattern. Sometimes he likes to find a card to copy, but more often than not, he makes up his own designs. He doesn’t limit himself to the square layout shown in all the cards, either. He makes oblongs and polygons and sometimes even 3-dimensional towers.

He thinks creatively about food, too. For lunch today, I offered him a choice of a peanut butter sandwich or a grilled cheese sandwich. He thought for a moment, then proposed, “How about a chicken sandwich?” OK, I have chicken, I can do that. Then he grinned and offered his topper: “How about a chicken AND APPLE sandwich?” Hmmm, that sounds kind of weird, but I have apples, so OK. And you know what? It was really good! If I had pooh-poohed his request because it was unusual and different, we would both have missed out on a really good treat. If he had hesitated to make his request because he thought it might be weird, we would have missed it, as well. But we both took a leap – boldly – and we were rewarded!

So, as I often do, I will take a lesson from my son. A lesson to think outside the box. A lesson to not be limited by rules and past experience. A lesson to not fear spectacular failure, only to fear boring success. A lesson to go ahead and try a chicken and apple sandwich!

 

June 13 Photo: Art

I consider myself reasonably cultured: I’m genuinely fond of most literary classics, I’m relatively well-versed in – and enjoy - classical music, and to say that I love performing arts of all sorts would be an understatement. But when it comes to art, at least art in the sense of paintings, sculpture, etc., I must admit to having rather plebian tastes.

I took a class in college called “The Arts in Concert” that was a combination of music, drama, art, and architecture appreciation that gave me a small degree of understanding of art. I learned a bit about composition, painting styles, what to look for in a piece of art. But when it comes right down to it, my evaluation of most pieces of art still comes down to either I like it or I don’t, and I can’t always tell you why.

Generally, I like art that is realistic. I prefer da Vinci to Picasso (with the exception of his non-cubist works, such as “Woman in White”). I love Michelangelo’s “David.” Jan van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Portrait.” Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” And yet I’m also a big fan of Jackson Pollock, although Mondrian leaves me cold. There’s no particular logic to what I like in art and what I don’t. (This will come as no surprise to my husband, who coined the expression “Sandy Logic” very early in our marriage.) So the artwork that I have chosen for my home does not fall into a single category.

Actually, choosing artwork for our home was a bit of a struggle for my husband and me, because our senses of what art is are very different. The painting over his fireplace was (and still is) a brightly colored abstract painting of musicians. The painting over my bed was a large, realistic flower blossom. And when we redecorated our bedroom right after our honeymoon, it took us nearly a full year to find a single painting that worked in that room that we both liked.

But the piece of art that is perhaps the most special to me in our home is a small stone carving of a pair of dancers that sits on our mantel.

I don’t remember the exact gift-giving occasion (it might have been our first Valentine’s Day together), but I do recall that it was a gift to my now-husband while we were engaged and taking ballroom dance lessons together in anticipation of our wedding and honeymoon. I knew I wanted to give him a sculpture representing a pair of lovers, and I pored through pages and pages of online art catalogs to find exactly the right piece. This piece has such beautiful lines and such a beautiful shape. It’s somewhat abstract yet it’s perfectly clear what it is intended to represent. The figures are separate yet moving in synch. The stone itself is nearly pure white, but with a few tiny imperfections that only serve to enhance its beauty. I love both the symbolism of the piece and its pure aesthetics. It is art.

You Gotta Have Art

This afternoon I wore shorts for the first time all season. I shaved my legs and everything. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, “Hey, I look pretty good for a forty-something mother of two.” My son looked at me and thought, “Hey, I could draw some great pictures on those legs!”

He loves anything you can write or color with: crayons, finger paint, sidewalk chalk, markers, even a rock that leaves a mark on other rocks will do in a pinch. For the most part he just scribbles, but he’s starting to make a few attempts at actually drawing. In the past, he would scribble for a bit and then beg me to draw something – a tow truck, a trash truck, an excavator – without wanting to draw anything himself. I couldn’t convince him to take a stab at making a picture on his own.

But on several occasions recently, he’s drawn a somewhat recognizable shape, like a circle or a triangle, and pointed it out to me. And today, he even drew a crude stick figure, complete with some arms and a head. Mostly even in the right places where arms and a head should go.

I love that he shows some interest in art. I don’t have much artistic talent myself, but two of my grandparents were very skilled artists (my grandmother even got her degree from Pratt Art Institute in New York City), so I was hoping that some of the talent that skipped over me might land in my kids’ generation.

But even if he doesn’t actually have any talent, I don’t mind as long as he enjoys art – either making his own or enjoying others. Because in some way, shape or form, you gotta have art!