Pat Knepley

Oct 03 2022

How to Incorporate Aesthetics into Your Art Class

Guest post by Pat Knepley

Why should the home educator include art as part of the core classical curriculum? Because all of humanity through the ages has used the arts to tell us stories about every aspect of the lives of the people – their culture, their nations, their history, their beliefs.

A general understanding of what is involved in art education is probably more valuable to the homeschooler than any artistic talent.

There are four components to a well-thought-out art program as described in the Discipline-Based Arts Education (DBAE). These components are 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, as intimidating as that might be.

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: Leonardo da Vinci’s famous fresco The Last Supper.

In this post, we’ll be considering aesthetics.

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that deals with beauty in the world and seeks to define what makes something beautiful. To further develop a child’s art literacy, ask some questions about what he/she feels about a piece of art.

Why does this appeal to you?
What makes it beautiful to look at?
How do you feel when you look at that?

Helping kids to relate to the world and communicate in art terms is immensely beneficial.

In a nutshell, art criticism is how one thinks about art and aesthetics is how one feels about art.

Aesthetics is the primary component of art used in interior design and fashion design, which seeks to discover what pleases the most people. Think about how you would feel walking into an expensive, exclusive restaurant with velvet curtains and marble tables versus the aesthetics of a local coffee shop with chrome stools and laminate counters.

When someone talks about an emotional response to art or design, that is aesthetics.

This iconic Renaissance fresco offers a great opportunity to ask what emotions da Vinci was trying to evoke from the viewer by depicting such a dramatic scene from the Bible: the very moment when Jesus tells his followers that one of them will betray Him.

What clues does the viewer get as to the emotions revealed in this scene, such as the hand gestures?

What can you imagine each disciple saying in response to the Lord’s announcement that one of them will betray him that very night?

How does the artist increase the sense of drama by the composition?

When looking at a piece of artwork, it is just as important to ask how you feel about it as what you think about it. As you go through your school year, why not take the time to incorporate aesthetics into your program? Find a book about art or art history, or go to one of many online art museums, and have your children react to some of the paintings and other artwork they see there. Better yet, go to a real art museum if you live near one.

You don’t have to be an artist to have a rich homeschool art program.

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.