Our Plans for Studying Art

When J was 4 ½ years old, I began to introduce him to artists. He didn’t study them in any depth (of course!), but it was fun for him to play with the different styles and at least become familiar with their names.

At that time our local museum had an exhibit of Georgia O’Keefe paintings. I tried to prepare him so he would know some of her work (making it more interesting for him when we visited the museum). Below are just two of his "copies" and his comments about them.

This picture is called Back Door With Snow. When asked what he saw in the painting, J said, "There's a black door. She painted brown. Let's go inside--what's inside?"



This picture's title is The Tent Door at Night. Below I typed J's comments in italics and L's questions in parentheses. See if you can keep up with the 4 1/2 year old logic!

(What do you see?) There's a triangle and a vertical line. The doors are black. (What's outside?) Sky and blue and gray. (What's at the bottom?) Black. (What's in the tent?) Toys and books and drawing paper. (What toys?) A slide and a swing. (Where's the artist?) In a tent. (Where was the tent?) Outside. (Where in the U.S?) Florida. (Why was she there?) To play.

We've continued to touch on different artists since then. Another very fun one was the artist Chuck Close who divided his pictures into small squares and painted a design of some sort in each square creating a pixilated image. I drew the bear and J did the work himself, box by box. Between the two is a rectangle that shows a closeup of how the artist created his work.

This school year I plan to do more of the same. We will "study" one artist a week. By study I mean that I will give J some background on the artist and then we will do a project using that artist’s style.

Following is my plan for this school year. I started with the Impressionists because the same museum currently has their paintings which we will go to see in September. I'm sure you know we'll be posting the results as we go along!

September: Cassatt, Monet, Manet, Degas
October: Limbourg Bros., Ghiberti, Van Eyck, Angelico, Masaccio
November: Botticelli, DaVinci (3 different lessons)
December: Durer, Raphael, Michelangelo
January: El Greco, Rubens, Rembrandt
February: Linnaeus, Gainsborough, Blake, Constable
March: Hokusai, Courbet, Morisot, Homer
April: Renoir, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Rousseau
May: Audubon, Rodin, Gauguin, Toulousse-Lautrec