If you haven’t ever tried Picture Study in your home, now is a great time to try it out. Here’s how it works:
- Ideally, each student would have a print of the piece of artwork, but in my house, I project the image to our living room TV. You might open it on a computer or an iPad.
- We all look at it carefully for a minute or two (depending on the complexity of the piece, our impatience, and our attention spans.)
- We turn off the TV and talk about what we saw.
- We guess the name of the piece (and if I haven’t identified the artist, we guess that also).
- We follow the conversation where it takes us until it naturally pauses, taking turns remembering things about the piece.
- We look at the image again and continue talking: What does this piece remind you of? Where in this piece would you like to be? What conversation is going on?
- We stop before anyone is bored. These conversations last a lot longer now that my boys are teenagers than they did when they were in elementary school. We have a lot more art and reading experience to draw on now than we used to, and our skills of attending and noticing are more honed than they used to be.
A great source for pictures that have already been screened by Christian parents is the Ambleside Online Art Study page. (Ambleside Online is a Charlotte Mason curriculum that has always been free to access online. Those creators work hard to provide a very broad education feast. It’s worth exploring for great resources that spread Beauty around the world.)
Art Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Sower_(Bruegel)
