At first, children make quaint stick figures. But just as painters who made art history didn`t stop there, children don`t have to stop their artistic development at that stage either. In a program at the Terra Museum, they can explore and experiment, following the innovations of a group of artists who in the 19th and early 20th Centuries launched the modern art movement.
”The Impressionists broke away from tradition,” says resource coordinator Donna Bruton. ”Their paintings have no sense of outline and instead of using continuous brush strokes their paintings are composed of marks.”
During the program called ”The Family Tree” on July 15 and 16, children will look at Impressionist paintings that make up the exhibit ”American Painters in France: 1830-1930,” which runs through Sept. 3 at the museum.
”When they look at them up close they will just see little marks,” says Bruton, ”but when they move away the marks give the impression of being trees and bushes, landscapes and people.”
Although children are used to watching images in constant motion from TV and movies and video games, Bruton says they don`t have any problem concentrating on something as seemingly static as a painting. ”If you structure their attention a little bit, and give them something to think about, they`ll look for it,” she says. ”They are maybe even better at it than adults.”
Bruton has created a treasure hunt to find various objects in the paintings. They`ll be told, for example, to ”go under the stairway and look for a stream. The water is this painting is not blue, but green.” When they zero in on the painting ”At the Brook, Giverny,” by Theodore Wendel, they`ll discover the innovative way the Impressionists used color. ”A tree isn`t just one shade of green, a trunk isn`t one shade of brown,” explains Bruton, ”so we`ll look for colors that are unusual, like the blue they used in trees.”
In a painting by Frederick Frieseke called ”Lady in a Garden,” the children will look for a woman in a striped dress. ”I want them to see that if you repeat the dabs of paint over and over again, they give a lot of motion to the painting even though the woman is standing still,” says Bruton. ”It`s a very active painting that`s exciting for the eyes.”
Children will then try to capture their own excitement by creating a
”tree shirt,” using the techniques they`ve observed. They`ll do some scribbling exercises to loosen up their touch before they make the dabs, squiggles and dots to create a tree on a T-shirt.
Bruton says that sometimes the shape of the tree isn`t as developed as it could be. ”They have a tendency to make lollipop trees, but they use the mark-making approach and their trees look like Impressionist trees,” she says.
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The program, she says, is not so much a lesson in art appreciation as an exercise in personal expression. ”Everyone is creative, and this kind of freedom of expression in an organized setting lets the creativity come through,” says Roberta Katz, the museum`s director of education. ”Creativity helps in making decisions, and that`s what life is all about.”
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”The Family Tree,” sponsored by the Sara Lee Corp., is 1-3 p.m. July 15 and 16 at the Terra Museum of American Art, 664 N. Michigan Ave.; 664-3939. The programs, which are for school-age children, are free, but reservations are required.