Art School

For this shortened week, we're doing Art School.

That is, yesterday, today, and tomorrow is filled with painting.

I had discovered some Bob Ross episodes being shown on some obscure PBS-like station on our cable network, channel 433. They're Tuesdays and Thursdays and I'm taping them. We have 4 so far. We love Bob Ross. His last name, too. (No relation, though.)

Yesterday the girls and I watched two of them, and today we're going to watch one more and try to paint one of them. We use acryllics, whereas he uses oils, so it will be a little different of a technique and color mixing. We'll see what the girls come up with.

Went to Michael's yesterday and stocked up on some paint, a really nice 1" brush for me, and a couple of painting knifes of which Bob makes such excellent use. We're ready.

Update at 6:30pm: One extremely interesting thing I discovered today is how well they are able to TALK about art, but how far they are from DOING it. I believe it's a hand-eye coordination developmental issue. We watch the shows together. They can comment very intelligently on how Bob does the artwork, how he makes it light on the right slope of all of the mountains in that painting so you can tell that the light is coming from the right, how he puts lots of different colors into one place so you see all of the interesting ways a tree can look. But they are ABSOLUTELY incapable of imitating him once they have the brush in hand.

It's as though what they know cerebrally completely switches off and is irrelevant to the enterprise at hand, which says something to me (though I'm not sure what) about how the brain develops. I'm sure that a conceptual understanding of the technique is important, but this made me see how much more there is to it.

We see how, step by step, Bob builds color into a work. His contention is that anyone can paint if you go step by step, and in fact I am living proof of that. We talk about painting all the time, the girls and I. THEY talk about how when you see a a tree it's not really just green. We talk about the various colors in the sky, the placement of color on the clouds as the sun is shining from different angles. We talk about layer method of painting, how the background goes on first, then it builds forward. But the most that they've been able to manage is that the sky is no longer just a 1-inch strip of bright blue, that it goes behind the mountains. They make uniform brown and green blobs instead of building dabs of color lightly on in layers, although Madison is better at organizing her blobs into a landscape than Ella. It's absolutely fascinating to see the difference between the two of them, and I'm sure that it has something to do with a simple 20-month age difference.

We'll keep at this. I will take photos of what they do and so I'll be able to watch their development on this dimension.