Posts Tagged ‘art’
Posted on June 30, 2009 - by Kay
Art Begs You to Notice It
I just recently came across this quote about art and thought it fit with the Charlotte Mason view of art quite nicely.
So I decided to share it with you all here. Enjoy!
Art begs you to notice it.
Why? Because art is God’s way of saying hello.
So pay attention to poetry.
Pay attention to music.
Pay attention to paintings and sculptures and photo exhibits and ballets and plays.
Don’t let all this go unnoticed.Your world is shouting out to you,
revealing something intrinsically glorious about itself.
Listen carefully.
Love art, the way art loves Life.~Neale Donald Walsch
Posted on March 31, 2009 - by
Books We Love: Matisse: The King of Color
A bit about the book…
Laurence Anholt has done a beautiful job of telling the story of Matisse and his nurse, Monique, who became a nun, in a way that children can relate to and enjoy. Since I didn’t know anything about this artist, I also enjoyed getting to learn more about his personality and his art, too.
What we loved…
While the illustrations were quite unique, I also loved the way that the author used typesetting to help ‘illustrate’ certain passages. During a passage about “diving in tropical lagoons and rowing on blue-green seas”, Anholt typesets the words in curves that go around the fish in the picture behind the words to hint at the motion of swimming and waves. But, more than anything, it was the story itself that captured both my attention and the attention of my six year old. There’s just something fascinating to me personally about an artist creating a chapel in a new and different way.
(Continue reading this article…)
Posted on August 22, 2008 - by
What Do I Do with ALL that Artwork??
When you live with a budding artist, you live with piles and piles of artwork. And ALL of it is special. And NONE of it can be thrown away. At least, that’s what my 5 year old tells me constantly. And as gung-ho as she is about recycling, I still can’t manage to convince her that we can recycle some of her artwork, too.
So, instead of living with the masses of piles everywhere, I started looking for ideas of what to do with it all to help contain it and keep it from taking over my entire house. I came across several great suggestions like these:
(Continue reading this article…)
Posted on August 21, 2008 - by
Photography as an Art Form
My 5-year-old is an artist. She loves to color. She loves to draw. She loves to paint. She loves to cut and paste. She loves to bead. She loves to write cards. She loves to stamp. And she loves to take photos. Not only does she have her own kid-friendly camera that she uses non-stop until the batteries run out, but she also loves to grab her daddy’s iPhone and take photos on it. She’s gotten relatively good at it (we have several photos of family members that she took that are part of our collection), but the most recent addition to her collection is particularly interesting. It’s obvious that she blurred whatever it was that she was shooting. BUT, the resulting image was just too beautiful to delete. We’ve printed out a copy and framed it to put in her room and I’ve got it set as my desktop pic on my computer, too.
Makes me wonder what other gorgeous pictures she could get by purposefully blurring the image…
I’m not sure if Charlotte Mason would consider photography a ‘handicraft’, but I’m thinking that in this day and age it’s most definitely an art form! And one that I want to encourage in my artist-of-a-daughter, too.
Posted on August 20, 2008 - by
Story Time at The Rienzi
When I was skimming through all the indoor Houston activites for kiddos on NinaLoca, I ran across some information that just really excited me. There is a mansion in the River Oaks area that has been donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, complete with all of the artwork and collectibles that the Masterson family had acquired over the years. It houses other collections from time to time and you can regularly tour it. But, during the summer time, they offer Rienzi Storytime Tours, every Wednesday in June and July at 10am, for kids ages 4-8, as well as other family activities. (Continue reading this article…)
Posted on August 20, 2008 - by
Great Book for Picture Study
At our last visit to the library Kate was disappointed to discover that they didn’t have any ‘Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?’ DVDs on the shelf. (Do you remember that geography-sleuth kids’ gameshow on TV in the late 80s with the catchy intro song by the group, Rockapella? These are the cartoons along the same story lines.) So, I told her that when we got home we would get online and request them via intralibrary loan. While I was online looking for her DVDs, I ran across this book that I thought sounded really promising. (I’m not really sure why I felt the need to tell you all that, unless I really just wanted to share with the world what a geek I was in the late 80s and still am, apparently, since I can still sing some of that theme song to this day…)
Where in the World? Around the Globe in 13 Works of Art, by Bob Raczka, has turned out to be my newest favorite book for Kate. It’s a collection of 13 works of art from around the world (duh, you probably got all that from the title) with a page describing the geographical location of the piece as well as the artist and the time he/she lived in. It’s written for kids, so the language isn’t a stumbling block but, thankfully, it’s not sing-songy either.
Since I’m planning on using the Charlotte Mason approach for homeschooling, this fits in PERFECTLY with her idea of picture study (which is just studying pieces of artwork). In fact, I can even see us making a color copy of the page with the artwork and hanging it on the fridge for a week or two as we discuss it and enjoy it and describe it to one another before moving on to the next piece of artwork in the book. Oh, and here’s another idea – after studying that piece of artwork hanging on the fridge, move it into the schoolroom and tack it on the giant map on the wall onto the country it represents. One could even put it on a timeline as many of the pieces span centuries of art.
But, the best part has been Kate’s reaction to it. As soon as we sat down and started reading about the first piece of artwork by Katsushika Hokusai from late 1700s Japan, Kate was spellbound. Of course, it helps that one of the things about Hokusai was that he loved art from the age of, you guessed it, FIVE. As soon as I read that, Kate interrupted me and said with a twinkle of excitement in her eye, “Mommy! I’m five. And I like art, too!”
At the end of the reading, the author includes the last words of Hokusai:
“If heaven gives me ten more years, or an extension of even five years, I shall surely become a true artist.”
Kate looked at me and said quite seriously, “But, he IS a true artist.” To which she added, “Mommy, I’m sad that he died. Because I would like to meet him and learn more about art from him.” This. From a five year old. Wow.
Kate is excited to read tomorrow night about Little Bay, Australia and the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. And the next night about Tahiti and Paul Gauguin. And before we finish our ‘world tour’, I may have just learned a few things about art, too!
Oh, and BTW, Bob Razcka has written SEVERAL books around art. I think I want them all!! 
