An Artsy Summer

Artist study has become one of the favorite things for our family and I’m so delighted. This summer we decided to continue a rotation of an artist to study and get to know their work. Essentially if you’re not familiar with the Charlotte Mason concept, we pick an artist and study paintings/work from them over a period of time, learn about the artist themselves, and have that art displayed over the course of a few weeks.

In a school rotation, we have one artist per term which is a 10-12 week rotation of one artist. Over summer we choose Thomas Cole because I personally was so captivated by the artwork on the cover of The Children’s Tradition (both the beta and update) and hadn’t heard of this artist before, but that’s not saying much. I grew up in public school so the ideas of classical tradition are new to me. Sure we had art class every once in a while but this getting to soak in and know some of the great art out there in the world. It’s lovely and simple but making the point to do it is key.

All in all, this post is here to encourage you to delight in the things you may feel as “extras” because they aren’t. They are tending to your soul and cultivating an appreciation for truth, goodness, and beauty in your home. We used art prints from Riverbend Press and just hung them in our breakfast nook over our piano. We rotated through each painting for a more in depth look and study and adding this into our summer rotation has helped me decide how I’m going to move forward with our formal lessons of Artist Study for the next term.

What I learned:

We are going to do more picture “narrations” were we gaze upon the picture for a while and then flip it over or put it away and ask my students to tell me all about it that they can. Seeing what stands out to them, what drew them in. I wanted to put out artists in our Book of Centuries or timeline (whatever notebooking system I decide on for this year) and so we can see how they were living or who else may be living about somewhere in the world while they are.

As we swap out our summer artist for our Term study (we are switching things up a bit and studying Murillo next!) I wanted to give encouragement. Sometimes we think as moms we need all the materials, have read all the books on the how and so forth, but sometimes it’s okay to just start something right where you are. Pick up the read aloud, play some classical music in the car instead of pop radio, and print out some beautiful art to sprinkle into your days and make them rich and full of real.