Art History

Sep 26 2022

How to Incorporate Art Criticism into your Art Class

Guest post by Pat Knepley

As an art teacher, I feel that art is an essential part of a well-rounded curriculum, as it adds so much value to the learning (and life) experience. But I am sure I need to do some convincing for reluctant home educators who already see a lot of course work they need to squeeze in to their daily routine. This is especially true when many homeschooling moms and dads confess their frustration with teaching art, because they don’t have artistic talents or abilities.

In an effort to show how teaching art need not be constrained by artistic talent, this month the See the Light blog is focusing on a discipline-based approach to art education. This approach focuses on integrating art with the disciplines, including art history, art criticism, aesthetics, and art production.

I am using Leonardo da Vinci’s, fresco The Last Supper as an example of how to approach a piece of art and explore fully each of the four disciplines for a rich art-learning experience. This week’s post will cover the next to a well-thought-out art program: art criticism. Again we return to The Last Supper as a base of understanding.

Art criticism simply involves talking about art. The viewer tries to get inside the head of the artist and ask questions such as, “What was the artist trying to say?” In art criticism, we learn to look at the art work with a critical eye as it relates to use of the seven art elements: line, shape, space, value, color, texture and form.

But the viewer should also look within herself and ask why she likes or dislikes this particular work. Being able to talk about a piece of art work and make it personal is a good way to increase critical thinking skills. There are ample opportunities to connect art to everyday learning. A basic understanding of the seven art elements and the five design principles (balance, proportion, rhythm, emphasis and unity) can be a great way to dive into a conversation when your son admires the graphics in a new game or your daughter gushes over a fabric design and texture.

When looking at The Last Supper, you would immediately notice the strong perspective that da Vinci employed in order to focus the viewer’s attention to the head of Jesus. The lines made if you follow where the ceiling meets the floor, and the lines made by the top of the tapestries on the wall create a strong vanishing point right at the head of Jesus. It was during this era of the Renaissance that artists discovered the principles of linear and aerial perspective to bring more realism to their works. da Vinci pioneered using one- point perspective to provide a strong focal point with his sacred subject matter. da Vinci also used geometry to arrange the rest of the composition. All of the twelve disciples are clumped in groups of three to form four triangles on the side of the table.

This can be a fun exercise for kids – print out copies of the image of The Last Supper and have your students use a marker to draw shapes where there are geometric aspects of da Vinci’s composition: the strong linear perspective and symmetrical balance. This compelling fresco captures the moment in Scripture when Jesus is at his last meal with his disciples, and has just said, “I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me.” His men are dumbfounded, asking “Surely, not I Lord!” The personalities of each of the disciples can be ascertained by the facial expression and body language that da Vinci was careful to individualize. It truly is an amazing work of art.

Note: Scroll down for a short (8 min) critical analysis of The Last Supper.

NEXT WEEK: We’ll continue our exploration of Discipline-Based Art Education by looking at The Last Supper from the perspective of aesthetics.

Author’s Note: The area of art education that makes people, if not nervous, perhaps hesitant . . . is the art-making process: art production. But drawing is a skill like any other skill. I believe it can be taught (like how to swing a tennis racquet can be taught) with age-appropriate instruction. I recommend the DVD-based drawing instruction that I host: Art Class from See the Light for ages 6 to 10. With this fun, foundational, skill-building series, kids of all ages will feel successful when learning to draw.

Take your art to the next level with See the Light videos:

And don’t miss these free resources from our blog:

Sep 19 2022

How to Integrate Art with History

There are four components to a well thought out art program as described in the Discipline-Based Arts Education (DBAE): Art History, Art Criticism, Art Production, and Aesthetics. The home educator should consider all of these components as equally valuable when they think of teaching art.

The best way to explain how to encompass all four components is to use a piece of art as an example that most people would be familiar with. Let’s look at Leonardo da Vinci’s famous fresco “The Last Supper”

Leonardo da Vinci was the quintessential Renaissance man of the late 15th century. He thought of himself as primarily an artist, but da Vinci was also a mathematician, inventor, scientist, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. Da Vinci spent his younger years as an apprentice to a master artist and increased in skill and recognition.

Later on, da Vinci’s wealthy benefactor asked him to paint a fresco to decorate the refectory (dining hall) in the monastery of Santa Maria Della Grazie. Leonardo worked on this project from 1495 to 1498. Even though he was a great painter, da Vinci was constantly experimenting with his materials, so this project took a long time.

For centuries, frescos had been painted by mixing tempera or watercolor paint into the wet plaster of a wall. That required the artist to work quickly before the plaster dried. Leonardo experimented with tempera, watercolor and even oil-based paint on dry plaster in order to get more detail. The problem was this experimental technique didn’t work, and the paint began to flake off shortly after the piece was completed.

In the 1600s, someone felt it would be allowable to cut a door through the wall that contains the fresco, so Jesus’ feet and a portion of the table were lost forever. A series of artists over the centuries, seeing that da Vinci’s original brilliant color was flaking off, tried to maintain the masterpiece by re-painting over the original, but it was turning into a mess. Then during World War II, a bomb nearly destroyed the monastery. The refectory suffered a lot of damage but the wall with the fresco only had minor damage. Over the ensuing years, rain and water damage through the thinner, repaired walls caused mold to grow on the fresco.

After all those years of misfortune, the most famous painting in the world was in serious trouble. So in 1999, a twenty-year restoration was initiated in order to return the Last Supper back to Leonardo da Vinci’s original vision. Most of the layers of additional paint from other artists have been carefully removed and we can now see the fresco as close to the original as possible.

Next week: We’ll continue our introduction to Discipline-Based Art Education by examining The Last Supper from the perspective of Art Criticism.

The Last Supper — Leonardo da Vinci

Take your art to the next level with See the Light videos:

And don’t miss these free resources from our blog:

May 17 2021

Collage: Turn Scraps into Art

[Guest post by master artist, Pat Knepley]

Spanish artist Pablo Picasso may be the most well-known name in the world of art. And most people think of him as a painter. However, Picasso was also a sculptor and even brought back an ancient art form to be part of the modern art scene: collage. The term collage derives from the French “coller” meaning “glue”.

In Picasso’s case, he and friend and fellow-cubist painter Georges Braque, coined the term collage to mean the act of pasting scraps of flat objects (paper, lace, wicker, labels,) onto the surface of a painted canvas to make it part of the visual statement.

Picasso started this modern trend by adhering some chair seat caning to one of his canvases. His friend Braque pasted scraps of shredded paper. Later, newspaper clippings and labels from bottles , in fact any flat object would be incorporated into a painting, so that the words were part of the overall composition. There are other artists who through the twentieth century and into today have embraced collage as a viable art medium.

When the Post-impressionist Henri Matisse was plagued with health problems later in life, he gave up painting in oils at a tall easel, as was his custom, to try a new medium of art – collage. Matisse began to cut out large paper shapes and have assistants glue them to a large canvas to “paint with scissors”. His foray into bright colors, organic shapes, and oversized compositions brought a whole new audience to appreciate the genius that is Matisse.

The African American artist Romare Bearden used collage to great effect to tell stories of black Americans, with a special emphasis on musicians. What makes Bearden’s collages so intriguing are the many layers of painted papers, magazine clippings, and photographs to create complex images. When Bearden made collage his signature technique in the 1960s, he started off with simply torn or cut paper. But as the years went on, he added foil, textured materials, and miscellaneous found objects.

Next Time: An easy and fun Charlotte’s Web collage project for you and your children to try.

Interested in doing more collages? Scroll to the bottom of this post and check out Art Projects: Poppy Collage.

Notes:

For more about Romare Bearden, see:

nga.gov/education/classroom/bearden/methc1.shtm

To learn more about Picasso and his collage work, check out this video:

May 10 2021

More than Words: Illustrating Great Stories (Pt. 2)

Guest post by Pat Knepley – In part one of this post, we looked at three great illustrators. This week we’ll consider four more: N. C. Wyeth, Arthur Rachkam, Jessie Willcox Smith, and Edward Detmold.

N. C. Wyeth

Newell Convers Wyeth was the patriarch of an entire family of successful artists. He and his wife home schooled their children, and included art instruction as the first subject each day. Their son Andrew Wyeth became the most well known American realist painter of the twentieth century. N. C. painted more than 4000 illustrations for publication over his lifetime.

One of his most successful books was when he illustrated the Robert Louis Stevenson classic Treasure Island. Wyeth had a vivid imagination that translated into stunning illustrations filled with compelling characters and exacting detail.

Wyeth was known for studying every aspect of the genre he was illustrating in order to heighten the realism, even spending some time out west working on a ranch so that the cowboys he drew for his western stories would be true to life.

N. C. Wyeth - Boys King Arthur — N. C. Wyeth – Boys King Arthur

Arthur Rackham

Arthur Rackham was one of the illustrators during England’s golden age of Book Illustration for the later years of the 19^th century until the start of the Depression. His style of using pen and ink line drawings overlaid with watercolor washes created an ethereal and fanciful look that worked well with the range of stories he illustrated. One of his classics was the fairy tale Rip Van Winkle published in 1905.

Jessie Willcox Smith

Jessie Willcox Smith was an American illustrator known for her works in Women’s magazines and for Children’s literature. Born and educated in Philadelphia, Smith had a long and successful career portraying young children even though she was never a parent herself.

Her rosy-cheeked children graced the covers of many magazines in the early twentieth century, and revealed an intuitive sense of children’s moods and movements. In addition to magazine work, Smith also illustrated classic Children’s literature, such as The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley and Heidi by Johanna Spyri from 1922.

Jessie Willcox Smith - Heidi — Jessie Willcox Smith – Heidi

Edward Detmold

Edward J Detmold was born in 1883 in England, and he was a twin. He and his brother were both talented artists with a gift for capturing plants and animals in all their natural beauty. Detmold was influenced by the compositions and color of Japanese prints. In 1909, Detmold illustrated Aesop’s Fables., and since so many of those stories have animals as the main characters, this commission was well suited to Detmold’s skills.

For the home educator, linking art to literature is a natural. Use a book your student is currently reading and have them illustrate one or more scenes. There are two approaches to take with a project like this: illustrate a scene that is described well, making sure the details match; or illustrate a lesser known scene where the artist can fill in details that the author did not take the time to describe.

More imaginative students will like this option. Keep the drawing to simple black pen or a very fine marker over an initial sketch in pencil. The more details added by the young artist, the better! Carefully reading a favorite line, within a chapter so get context, can provide the perfect inspiration (and caption) for a drawing. So start reading some classics and let the words cause your imagination to translate into beautiful pictures.

Try your hand at illustrating a Bible story with Art Projects, Dreams of Joseph:

Art Projects: Dreams of Joseph (Marc Chagall)

May 03 2021

More than Words: Illustrating Great Stories

Guest post by Pat Knepley

Our current culture is overwhelmingly visual, with television and movies accounting for most of the narrative stories we know. Since the time movies were invented in the early part of the twentieth century, many classic pieces of literature have been put to film, and indeed may be have more of a following than the original written work.

Who can read Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of OZ without envisioning Judy Garland as Dorothy, as she played in the 1939 film? Or read Margaret Mitchell’s classic of the antebellum South Gone With The Wind and not imagine Clark Gable as Rhett Butler?

But before the dawn of motion pictures, the only images attached to great works of literature were the ones in the mind of the reader, or the very few that were illustrated.

Illustrations in Classic Literature

Classic Literature is called “classic” because it transcends the time it was written to appeal to a wide audience with a compelling story. Many works of fiction fit the bill – from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll to Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. What makes these works unique is that they were more than words: these two classics contained iconic illustrations.

Most people think of book illustrations as being for young children’s picture books. But there are many classic books for adults that have masterful illustrations that can also be considered classic. For Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the original illustrator was Arthur Rackham. For the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, it was Sidney Paget. The work of these artists did much to popularize these stories even more. Book publishers would often take a book or magazine series that already had commercial appeal and re-introduce it with well-executed drawings that brought the story to a whole new audience.

George Cruikshank

Most scholars agree that it started with the works of Charles Dickens, a writer in 19^th century England. His classic tale of an orphan on the streets of London , Oliver Twist, was illustrated by Dickens’ friend and fellow countryman George Cruikshank. Cruikshank was a caricaturist who made a name for himself going after the politicians of the day in England. But when he illustrated the colorful characters in Oliver Twist in 1838, the entire world was able to see his incredible talent, and enjoy Dickens’ endearing story all the more.

Howard Pyle

Considered the father of American book Illustrators, Howard Pyle was born in Delaware in 1853. From a young age Pyle was more interested in drawing than in his academics, so he was encouraged by his parents as a teenager to study classical art in Philadelphia. He started his art career as an illustrator for several magazines out of New York. In

1884, Pyle wrote and illustrated The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, which is a novel that wove English folklore and traditional ballads into an exciting narrative that became an instant classic. Pyle was a master illustrator, and founded his own school in 1900 to train other illustrators. Several of his pupils, including N. C. Wyeth, became famous in their own right following the principles espoused by Pyle.

In 2 Weeks: In Part 2 of this post, we’ll look at three more illustrators, including one of the greatest illustrators of all time: N. C. Wyeth.

Art History

Take your art to the next level with See the Light videos:

And don’t miss these free resources from our blog:

Take your art to the next level with See the Light videos:

And don’t miss these free resources from our blog:

N. C. Wyeth

Arthur Rackham

Jessie Willcox Smith

Edward Detmold

Try your hand at illustrating a Bible story with Art Projects, Dreams of Joseph:

Illustrations in Classic Literature

George Cruikshank

Howard Pyle

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