During a recent visit to a Van
Gogh exhibit with my young adult daughter, we listened to a cell phone
description of the technical differences among the artist’s numerous paintings
of a postman. Then we picked up a pamphlet describing the friendship Van Gogh
enjoyed with the postman Joseph Roulin and his wife. “That’s what’s important to know!” proclaimed my
daughter, who promptly bought the Washington, D.C., subway card displaying Van
Gogh’s
postman.
So why not let a work of art
inspire youngsters to write their own stories?
Find paintings in a local museum
or art gallery, online or in an art history book. Ask children to look at a
painting with several questions in mind as they imagine their story:
-
who are the
people in the painting?
-
how are they
related or connected to each other?
-
what were they
doing just before the painter fixed them on the canvas? what will they do next?
-
is the weather or
atmosphere in the painting important to your story - is it a bright sunny day
or a spooky, stormy night?
-
does the story
have a happy ending or is there mystery or sadness?
If children choose a landscape or
building, they can create characters to fill the space. Or children can read an
artist biography and then write their story.
Two of this year’s Caldecott Honor books are biographies of artists - The
Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky’s Abstract Art by Barb Rosenstock, illustrated by Mary Grandpré and
Yuyi Morales’
Viva Frida. In the Noisy Paint Box we read how Vasya
Kandinsky saw “Thundering
arches of aqua and ebony, with shrill points of cobalt and saffron…Vasya heard the
colors singing…and
saw the music dancing.” With those noisy
colors in mind, what words and stories could be inspired by Kandinsky’s Two Ovals or
White Zig Zag?
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