For art this year we’ve been working our way through The Lamb’s Book of Art 1. It was a very generous gift from Marsha from her homeschooling hand-me-downs. I’m more than grateful. I’ve taken the black and white pages of the book, run copies for my kiddos, put them in a folder and taught a lesson a day. For the most part, the kids love it. Sometimes, the lessons are a little difficult, but mostly they can do them with ease. I love this curriculum because it covers the fundamentals of art in small easy steps, incorporates the masters and encourages studying them further, and is biblically based. Here’s the author’s philosophy from his official site.
In that art curriculum we had been studying color, painting techniques, and Impressionism. We noticed that our local Arts Center had a temporary exhibit of the Impressionists and I got super excited! Until I saw the prices ($10 per adult, $6 per child over 5 years old). But I was still determined to find a way to take the kids. I really, really wanted them to see a Monet and Degas in real life and to discuss all those neat things we had just been learning. Then I recently ran into another homeschooling friend who mentioned theArkansas Arts Center has a 2 for the price of 1 deal on the third Thursday of each month. Yay! That lessened the steep cost for us and we made plans!
It was a beautiful day and while we were gathering our crew we snapped a few pics. I asked The Oldest to take some pictures of Matt and me since we don’t have very many of us. I’m so glad he did. And didn’t he do a marvelous job?!
I must tell you the reality is that Matt was trying to lick my face for all the shots leading up to this so I was pulling away from him and laughing hysterically. And since one of my sweet friends mentioned that I looked all put together (Hi Christie!) I feel the need to also tell you the necklace is my 3 year old mall buy for 7 bucks and that I was wearing men’s too large gym socks with men’s brown dress socks over them because my only “town shoes” are too big and I don’t own any girl socks. Put together, I am not. Looks are deceiving.
Then we made our way into the exhibit and were glared at unapprovingly by the curators and museum techs. For good reason, it turns out. We were giving the kids instruction on not getting too close to the art, not being too loud, all while trying to contain the Toddler/Baby who was wiggling and fussing, attempting to teach the olders about what we had been learning, and keeping the 4 year old entertained. You know, while smiling, taking pictures, and trying to enjoy it ourselves.
And then it quickly unraveled. The 19 month old Baby went from irritated to wailing, the 6 year old girl was overcome with awe and TOUCHED the more than 100 year old art then when corrected melted, cried, and pouted, and 4 year old BigMan started running around the museum. Within minutes of this scene, the museum techs saw that Matt was taking pictures and confronted him, even asking him how many pictures he had already taken. Embarrassing. In our defense, in Chicago when Matt was visiting the Art museum there he was completely allowed to photograph the art so long as he didn’t use a flash. We wrongly assumed the same there. For the record, don’t take pictures there.
But I was determined to make it through the exhibit. Because I wanted dearly to see the masters’ works. And I knew the kids would take away something from it. And because I’ve quit expecting perfection, life is going to happen in the midst of littles being, well, littles. And the rest of the world would do well to learn a little tolerance and acceptance. Plus I had paid a good half price to be there alongside the public high schoolers who were oblivious to the awesome works they were standing in front of. At least my hooligans were under the age of 10. So, there, take that stuffy stuck up art center goers. Oh, I kid. :) Kind of.
The whole art-viewing experience was less than 40 minutes I’m sure, but I tell you all this to say – we take field trips. We expose our kids to culture. We don’t leave some of the kids home, we just don’t most of the time. We go, we lower our expectations, and we laugh (a lot). We aren’t waiting for the right time. This isthe right time. The 2 oldest boys were picking out the art with mostly “cool colors”, finding the art with bold short strokes, talking about how the artist had used complementary colors here and there, looking at how the art was an “impression” of women standing off in the distance, seeing what the masters’ “still lifes” looked like. And excitedly telling us which ones were their favorites.
For all the outward appearances of failures, the art center experience was an outstanding success!
May you also see the successes in the midst of all the failures!
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