Art appreciation

(updated)

Last night I was ordering the pictures for Art Appreciation for our upcoming academic year. This will be our third year of doing formal art appreciation so I thought I'd share how we do it.

First:  Select 3 artists for the academic year; one for each term.  (Ideally you try to tie these in to the periods of history you are studying).

Second: Select six pieces of work per artist.  (I use the selection from Ambleside Online). You will look at one piece for two weeks.

The images should have an edifying effect on the child; they should be beautiful and inspiring and express great ideas. As Charlotte Mason said, the images should express ""the great human relationships, relationships of love and service, of authority and obedience, of reverence and pity and neighbourly kindness; relationships to kin and friend and neighbour, to 'cause' and country and kind, to the past and the present."

I get these developed into a photograph 6x4.

Third:  Start by reading or telling the child a few pertinent details about the artist.  Depends on the artist, but only a few details are needed to put the artist into the context of history/nationality etc. (this will depend on the age of the child and who the artist is). We have some lovely picture books from various series for some of the artists which I read.

We are doing Degas at the moment and the children have enjoyed the book Degas and the Little Dancer (Anholt's Artists)

our artist at the moment

The Katie books by James Mayhew are a good source of lots of lovely classic paintings entwined in a story format, and are enjoyable for children).
(or, for older children there are some lovely free online books (for example here) to read about the artist.)

Then pop the name of the artist and DOB/date of death, into your Timeline or Book of Centuries.

Fourth: Select your first image.

Ask the child to look at it quietly for a few minutes (for us, two minutes in practice).
I then take the picture away and ask the child to narrate it...that is, tell me everything they can remember about the picture.
I then give them back the picture and we look at it again together and talk about it, telling them the name of the image as well.

Then a few open ended questions...did you like it? What was your favourite detail?

Fifth: Frame it and display it.  We have a frame with magnets on the back that is stuck on our whiteboard. I put the image in there for two weeks, and so when the kids wander past they look at it.

Sixth: After the first week the children sketch the image in their art books.

Seventh: Two weeks later I take the image out, and stick it our Art Book, with the name of the image underneath, and the date it was painted.

 



Van Gogh

These are some photos of our art book.

Monet

and then you get a new one out!

And over time you slowly build up a portfolio of images you have looked at which the children love looking through,  and you help your child develop an eye for beauty, and an appreciation of art.


Art appreciation sounds complicated and daunting, but as you can see, it is immensely simple.



We have looked at:

Year 1:  Van Gogh,  Michelangelo, Rubens

Year 2: Monet, Fra Angelico, Degas

Year 3:  Giotto,  Da Vinci,  Velazquez




From here:

Our art prints ought to put "our children in touch with the great thoughts by which the world has been educated in the past, and to keep . . . them in the right attitude towards the great ideas of the present" -- And bring us into the "world of beauty created for us by those whose Beauty Sense enables them not only to see and take joy in all the Beauty there is, but whose souls become so filled with the Beauty they gather through eye and ear that they produce for us new forms of Beauty."