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.