Our Recent Art Endeavors

As I mentioned in the last post, we are focusing on art and music in our homeschool this month. Here are a few of our recent art activities.

The boys have been spending big chunks of time mixing colors. Adam especially enjoys making rows and rows of different hues using watercolors and a medicine dropper. It's so great that they are finally at an age where they can do this kind of activity relatively independently without making a huge mess.



I was really disappointed that the boys were sick and had to miss last week's co-op class. The focus for the class was sacred art and music. My mom watched my boys long enough for me to go and get my class organized and hand things off to another mom. Basically, we talked about the important role of monasteries in the development of such great treasures of sacred art and music. We listened to Gregorian chant and looked at beautiful icons. Then the children had the opportunity to paint their own icons. The whole experience was rooted in prayer and I heard that they made beautiful icons.

I brought the icon materials home for my boys to do here. Unfortunately, they were not very interested in my explanations of icons. Adam just could not wait to use the gold paint. He proceeded to paint his entire plaque gold... I think he did about 7 coats of gold. I could not persuade him to paint even a cross on top of that shiny gold paint. He insisted that it is perfect and holy and shiny just as it is. Now, a few days later, it is displayed on our prayer table and I am beginning to think he is right.

Ray did get a bit more into the process. He painted Jesus sitting on a stool holding a pink Bible. He told me that it's Jesus teaching the little children. He then painted a big (BACKWARDS) J on the icon so everyone would know that it's Jesus. I was proud of him and I gave him a second plaque so he could paint a train. (Adam was still painting layers of gold on his!)

The most memorable part of the icon activity was the clean-up. I sent Adam into the bathroom to wash the gold paint off his hands. Ray helped me clean up the table. When I got to the bathroom I found water flowing over the edge of the counter and TWO FEET (I'm not exaggerating!) of soap bubbles rising up out of the sink. Adam laughed an "I'm sorry" at me. The triumph of the day for me was that I calmly told him, "For your safety, you need to go up to your room right now" and I cleaned it up. I really heard God chuckling at me. I knew I had been pushing an agenda .... wanting the boys to draw beautiful holy images exactly the way I invisioned. And I knew God was reminding me to see Him in soap bubbles and mischievious boys. It really was sacred art. (But so much for them being able to do art without making big messes.)

Lastly, today we looked at some artwork by Wassily Kandinsky. We talked about abstract art and we decided to make our own art inspired by this Kandinsky painting:

We had a great time with this. We drew the circles with oil pastels and then painted over each square with a different shade of watercolor. I was especially impressed by the thought and focus that Ray put into his. Of course both boys put their own twist into their pieces. I think they turned out really nice. We are going to enter them into next week's Art and Music Showcase with our co-op.

Ray's Masterpiece -

Adam's Masterpiece -