Vincent Van Gogh

I was in my new school today and there on the wall was the ubiquitous print of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh and it got me to wondering. Why is it that nearly every primary school I have been in recently seems to have some artwork by Van Gogh somewhere on its walls? I'm not complaining you understand, just wondering what the reason is for his popularity with this age group.

Perhaps it is the way he used lots of bright colours and pure hues. Perhaps it is the way his brushstrokes are clearly visible and invite copying by even the most reluctant of young painters. Perhaps it is the gory story of how he cut off his own ear.

Anyway, while I was thinking about this I cam across a version of Don McLean's excellent song "Vincent" (which is possibly the best song about an artist and his works) by Josh Groban. Some kind person has posted a You Tube video of this with a slide show of some of the artist's paintings. The fades between images are particularly well-timed in this one so I thought I would post it for anyone bored with the McLean original (though I can't think why anyone would be).

Take One Picture

Every year the National Gallery in London runs its "Take One Picture" scheme for primary schools. The idea is that one of the paintings from its collection is chosen to be used both in art and other curriculum areas leading to a display of submitted work at its annual "Take One Picture" exhibition. This year the gallery has chosen one of my favourites: J. M. W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire of 1839.

Full details of this year's scheme, which runs until November 2008, can be found on this website. The "Across the Curriculum" section contains a number of cross-curricular ideas that have been used successfully in the past as well as some examples of the artworks produced by schools. The gallery offers a one-day Continuing Professional Development (CPD) course to help teachers get to grips with the possibilities offered by the painting.

The Getty Museum

The Education section of the website run by the Getty Museum in California has a number of promising areas including some lesson plans, resources, games and their TeacherArtExchange listserv (as mentioned in a previous post). You can get to the site by clicking here. The games and lesson plans cover more than just art so it might be worth looking through for ideas.

Claude Monet

This week, to tie in with looking at water-themed topics in numeracy and geography we are going to be doing some watercolour paintings based on the French Impressionist Claude Monet's Water Lily series of paintings, which he completed at his house in Giverny in the last 30 years or so of his life. While looking for some pictures to give to the children to inspire them to produce their own water lily paintings, I came across a wonderful website with images of Monet's paintings. I have added it to my links but you can also get to it by clicking here.

The images are organised by time, place and theme so it is very easy to find anything you want and all of them seem detailed enough to reproduce. I just love the way the pictures constantly change to give you an idea what is on each linked page. If you go to the site's home page you will find a number of other links about the painter, his life and works. Check it out.

If you want ideas on what to do as an activity, some have been submitted to the Getty Museum's TeacherArtExchange website and you can get to it here.

kidsart

I've added a new link, this time to kidsart, which is a non-profit making website where kids and schools can have galleries to showcase their art. The link will actually take you to their own links and resources page, which is worth checking out as their tips are short, to the point and very child-friendly.

The Victorians

Someone was asking me about ideas for incorporating art into a history unit on the Victorians. In a way there are far too many things that could be done but, after giving it some thought, I thought that doing something on the Arts and Crafts Movement, and William Morris in particular, would be suitable.

There is a good web resource on the movement here, which provides short info-bytes on the main personalities involved as well as links to galleries, museums and collections that house some of their work. William Morris used a lot of natural forms in his designs so he is an ideal subject for spring and summer. If you want to find out more about him and see some examples of his work then why not take a look at the website of the William Morris Society, which can be found here. If you want to see an idea of how to use his work to inspire art projects then there is a good display available on the website of St Nicholas Church of England Community Primary School in Warwickshire, which you can get to by clicking this. Why not cut designs into polystyrene tiles and then use them as printing blocks to create your own wallpaper designs?

You can get more help on using William Morris in teaching from the Education Department of the William Morris Gallery here, including an Inspired by Nature resource pack, which is free to download and suitable for key stage 2 pupils.

Otherwise, to find out more about Victorian art there is an excellent links page here. This site (the Victorian Web) is, in part, funded by the National university of Singapore and there are links on most areas of artistic endeavour: design, architecture, photography, sculpture and fashion. Personally, among my favourites, are the cartoons from Punch on subjects ranging from politics to women and children. It is well worth browsing for both history and art ideas.

How to videos

For those of us who need a little help with our art techniques there is an American site I've discovered called Expert Village, which has a whole section dedicated to art here. There are videos on a very diverse range of topics from art and craft projects suitable for Foundation classes, through basic how to draw sessions to more sophisticated painting and sculpting videos. Its well worth browsing through this website and none of the videos I've looked at have been very long. Best of all, its completely free!

I've also found the videos on You Tube (though its probably better to get them from Expert Village themselves). Here's Debbie showing you how to make thumbprint art:

Drawing Lessons

For the less confident drawers among us there are a lot of useful drawing lessons on the Drawspace website. All of them have been created by Barbara Hoddinott and Drawspace instructors and then divided up into Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced levels. They have also been well-indexed to help you find help on whatever you need. It is free to register to view the lessons on line (though you have to pay to be able to download and print them off).

One of my favourites is the lesson on how to draw a dog's nose - surreal until seen in context of the whole dog!

You can now get to Drawspace in links.

The Big Draw

I've added another useful link - this time to the Big Draw over at the Campaign for Drawing website. Or you can just click here.

October 2008 will see the ninth running of the Big Draw and over 1000 venues across the country will be taking part. According to the booklet I received, schools are certainly eligible to take part and if you register yours with them you will get a Best Practice CD full of advice , which will tell you everything you need to know about running an event. You can also download resources in pdf format from the website, which will give you, among other things, ideas for drawing activities.

Big Draw Day itself is on 11th October 2008 but you may prefer to do some drawing before then and just hold an exhibition on the day itself.

Circle Circus

Let's go cross-curricular again by mixing some art, some mathematics and some French. Why not challenge your children to see what pictures they can make using a single shape repeated over and over again in different sizes. To inspire them, just show them the following French song and animation I found on YouTube entitled "Circle Circus". Or, just watch it yourself for fun. Altogether now: "Shebam! Pow! Plop! Whizz!".

Create Your Own Masterpiece

Another goody obtained during my recent visit to the Royal Academy is the book Color Your Own Modern Art Masterpieces by Muncie Hendler. Published by Dover Publications Inc. in 1996, it's a useful resource book for introducing children to colour in modern art, with both black and white images that can be coloured and already-coloured images for reference. Some of the paintings, such as those by Willi Baumeister (1889-1955) and Auguste Herbin (1882-1960), would also be excellent for discussions on shapes (and hence could be linked to numeracy sessions).

Remember, it's not colouring in - it's creating your own masterpiece!

To see an example of why Herbin's works are so useful for any consideration of shape, take a look at his Nude of 1960 in Tate Modern, which you can find here.

"I can't draw!"

One of the problems I have encountered in trying to teach art in primary schools is in having to overcome an attitude of "I can't draw!". On a recent visit to the Royal Academy in London I came across a delightful storybook that addresses this very problem. First published by Walker books Ltd in 2003, award-winning children's author and illustrator Peter H. Reynolds's "The Dot" is the delightful story of how Vashti starts with this exact attitude but goes on to exhibit at the school art show. What makes the difference for Vashti is the value her teacher places on her 'dot'. This book is really a great example of how to inspire creativity in others.

If you are experiencing just this kind of resistance to art-making in the classroom, why not start an art lesson with a reading of this book and then challenge the children to make their own marks in art!

By the way, not only is this an inspirational book (both for pupils and teachers) but the author's own website is something of an inspiration itself. Check it out here and let your own creativity loose.

Images and Clips of the Natural World

Well I'm back... from outer space... I just walked in...

I'll start up again with a website that is extremely useful for cross-curricular links between art and science.

If you are looking for images or even movie clips of plants and animals to inspire children to produce their own pictures then the best place to go is here. ARKive describes itself as a "Noah's Ark for the Internet era - a unique global initiative, gathering together into one centralised digital library, films, photographs and audio recordings of the world’s species." It has been designed to be child friendly, which also means that it is easy for adults to use and to find things.

ARKive also has a site for teachers with some useful science resources, so don't forget to check this as well.

Visual Arts Data Services

Another new link has been added, this time to the Visual Arts Data Services (VADS), which is a gateway to digital images for use in arts education.

Based at the University College for the Creative Arts in Farnham, the VADS have over 100,000 images on line that are freely available and copyright-cleared for use in teaching and learning in the UK. Their images cover almost everything you can think of including: ceramics, furniture, glass, jewellery, textiles, architectural drawings, public monuments, religious buildings, urban design, fashion design, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, product & packaging design, drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture and photography. This means that they will be useful not only in art lessons but also in D&T, History and RE. For example, through the VADS, you can gain access to over 7000 war posters from the collection of the Imperial War Museum. Check it out - you'll be spoilt for choice.

Golden Time

I've added a new link, which will take you to a page with free activities and ideas for golden time. A lot of them are arts and crafts based and have been divided up into those suitable for Foundation and Key Stage 1 and those for Upper Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. I think its well worth a visit!

A Modern-Day Mona Lisa

A few more links have been added - this time to websites devoted to particular artists. If anyone has any favourites they've found that they want added just let me know.

I've mentioned Leonardo da Vinci before as a sort of code for creativity but I thought I would post a You Tube video of someone producing their own version of the Mona Lisa with MS Paint. It gives an idea of what is possible when art meets ICT, though I suspect it took more than 5 minutes to produce originally. Enjoy...

Update on links

Ok, I think I've worked out how to embed a link in a post now, so Doug's own blog is here.

Links to the education pages of London Galleries and Museums

I have started to work on the 'Useful Links' section and added in some links to the education pages for a number of galleries and museums in London. More useful stuff will follow. Once this section is full I may have to think about organising it more efficiently but for now it will do as a start. If anyone finds that some of the links don't work any more just let me know.

Oh, and thanks to Doug Dickinson for bringing yesterday's You Tube video to my attention. Doug was the inspiration behind setting up this blog and he deserves credit for that. He has his own blog at http://www.dougdickinson.co.uk/blog/index.html, which is about ICT, teaching and learning. Now I just have to go away and find out how to embed links to such things.

Let's start at the very beginning...

Which, I hear, is a very good place to start. Apparently, when you read you being with ABC, when you sing you begin with Do-Re-Mi. When considering creativity in education you could do worse than listen to Ken Robinson on the subject. For once size does matter and it's well worth listening and watching right through to the end (it doesn't hurt that the message is wrapped in such an entertaining package).



There's a serious message here about the fact that education tends to stifle creativity when it should be celebrating and nurturing it. Do we just want children who can do? Or do we want them to be able to do creatively in whatever subject or field?

It annoys me that art is seen as a soft subject and not as worthy as, say, mathematics when it has so much to offer (including a lot of links with mathematics). As a child I wanted to be an artist but my school had other ideas for me, especially as I was also good at things like mathematics. I could have been good at both but it seemed to be an either-or situation with teachers at the time. I was no creative genius but I could certainly have been more creative than I was. We should all take time to stop and think about what would happen to Leonardo da Vinci in today's education system. Would we still get the Mona Lisa as well as early ideas for the invention of the helicopter? Not to mention all the other topics to which he turned his attention. Were the observational skills so useful to his artistic production also useful in scrutinising the world around him? Were his mathematical skills in geometry and proportion also useful in his painting? Or did the one support and enhance the other?

In the beginning...

Every journey has to start with a single step. This is my first step into the world of blogging. WHat will my second step be? You'll have to come back and find out. :)