I tried a different approach in the drawing class last week. I wanted to see how children interpret art and wanted to encourage them to look beyond just the first impression of a painting and try and see if they could think from the artist's perspective.
It was quite ambitious to try with 6- 8 year olds ! But I wanted to try it anyways !
So I printed out different paintings of horses - one of a tribal painting of horse, a kalamkaari horse, a very realistic oil painting of a horse etc.
I asked the children to point out what the difference was in each painting of the horse. They pointed out things like - this looks like a real horse , this looks very decorated - like a king's horse and so on.
Then I asked them to think about why although all the people that had drawn a horse were very familiar with how a horse looked but still they chose to draw it differently. This set them thinking, but they could'nt come up with any reasons.
So I rephrased it and asked them what is it that the artist wanted to show differently in his painting of the horse - and promptly came up with -the colours - the decoration and - the story .
I was quite impressed that they came up with "story" - a very first step in understanding what the artist wanted to convey through a painting.
So this was quite a good headway in a 15 minute discussion with 5 different paintings of a horse !
The rest of the class was to come up with their own painting of an animal (I passed around simple rubber animal toys that they could use as reference) and convery a story through their painting.
The last step was to sit in a circle and try and see if the others could guess what the child had tried to convey through his /her drawing of the animal.
The stories were simple, the drawings were simple, but I guess I did succeed in getting across a little of the message that it is important to express themselves through their paintings !
