L’Académie des Beaux-Arts 1997-1998
WRITING THE YEAR
Karen, Deena, and I wrote this school year: The Academy of Fine Arts. Our family's school year name would be in French; Karen's in Italian; and Deena's was in Spanish.
As we three sat in my living room to discuss the year, Karen pulled out a piece of paper to take notes, but instead of drawing the usual mind map with circles, like this...
...she drew some squiggly blotches. Then she realized that the blotches looked like daubs of paint on a palette. Right then she enclosed the blobs inside a line and created a painter’s palette, and that became our mind map for the year.
Ironically, none of Karen’s masterpieces graced the covers of our two art years: 1997-8 and 2012-13. How did that happen?
The five components—
Ancient
Renaissance
Baroque, etc.
Impressionist
Modern
The component names didn’t quite stick in our memories because we couldn’t really see them on the mind map.
Each component was to have three focuses—the time period, an art term, and a medium. For example:
Ancient, Composition, Sculpture
These three terms were put inside the paint blotches and the names of the components were tiny and bordering the blotches:
Golden Mean Composition Machine
Perpetually Permuting Perplexing Perspective Parameters (Why couldn’t I remember this?)
Light, Dark, Leave Your Mark
Smocks, Blots and Brushes
Magnificent Madcap Masterpiece Makers
OUR PROJECT
Writing curricula during pre-internet times was a logistical adventure. This year we wrote the curriculum in a church multipurpose room. Karen, Deena and I met at my church, and spent at least an hour carrying in the volumes of encyclopedias and books on our subjects, and then setting up long tables used for food, books, and writing.
In my BYU humanities classes, the professors used slides to show us art and architecture. We decided to do the same for our children. We would share 50 art/architecture slides per component--250 in all.
It was a huge undertaking to even find that many important pieces for each component, much less try to share them all with our children and hope that they might remember some of them!
In the end I suppose I didn’t really write the curriculum. I took the photos. Hal had a really good Cannon camera, which he brought home from his mission in Japan. I used it to take photos of the paintings, architecture, and drawings we needed for our components. For five days I was bent over a table taking pictures of things from the many books we took to the church. Whew!
These were developed into slides and photos for each family, and we had the descriptions for each piece.
SCHOOL ROOM WALL
Karen and I used to drive by Pomona College when she did errands or sometimes when we went to Barbara Cheatley’s, a little store in downtown Claremont. One time while driving by the college gates I saw the quote engraved there, and wanted that quote on our wall for school that year.
I kept the blue background from the pioneer school year on the wall but took down everything else. Then I added an arch, which was just two posts and a lintel, with the quote from the Pomona College gates:
"Let only the eager, thoughtful, and reverent enter here."
This is part of a photo of the only shot I have of our arch. You can see Fra Angelico's Annunciation, on the right, with our mind map palette above it. Autumn Heather is on the couch.
We forgot to write a school year song.
We did this plenty of times--forget a usually crucial element to the year. We were making this all up as we went along. There was really no one who had ever written out a list of the elements of an EPIC Adventure, and we didn't have one at that time either, so we forgot to do certain things sometimes.
Usually we would get engrossed in working on a new element we were adding, like the 250 slides, and would forget to work on other parts of the school year!
The Spectrum Song from Disney's Ludwig von Drake, was a sort-of adopted song for the year, but it didn't stir our souls:
Red, yellow, green, red, blue blue blue
Red, purple, green, yellow, orange, red redRed, yellow, green, red, blue blue blue
Red, purple, green, yellow, orange, red red
Blend them up and what do you get?
Ceries, chartreuse, and aqua
Mauve, beige, and ultramarine, and every colour in between
Hazo ka li ka no cha lum bum
Colour has it's harmony and just like I have said
Red, yellow, green, red, blue blue blue
Red, purple, green, yellow, orange, red red
Blend them all and what do you get?
Ceries, chartreuse, and aqua
Mauve, beige, and ultramarine, and every colour in between
Ing za ri ka fo zi brun brun
Colour has it's harmony and just as I have said
Red, yellow, green, red, blue, pink, grey
And white, and plaid and blue, green, white, yellow and toodinz 'n' and and and
right and and strips with blue and a black and Plaid and a....a
oo and ...vut vut, vait a second, vut vut's going on wid all da colours?
Blue, red, green, green, white, white, black....
vut ever happened to just plain old lavender blue dilly dilly dilly dilly.......dilly
....silly
OUR YEAR
We had a lot of fun doing learning about the ancient world through art.
The Greek gods and goddesses--
(more on this in the next post)
I have very few photos from this year. Until 2004, when I got a digital camera, I didn't take very many photos of our school activities.
Amber's mosaic, modeled on an ancient mosaic and made from seeds and beans--
An activity with the Kindricks: measuring our faces and calculating
how close our physical features come to the Greek ideal, i.e., the Golden Mean.
Sadie measures Jasmyn
Amber is measured by Brittany
Will, Giselle, Autumn Heather, and Hal finished measuring?
Giselle measures her head
Chase's medieval castle fortress, made out of 'wood' like the first medieval castles.
An inclusion activity: using nonverbal communication, the kids made a castle out of paper--
The year started off with a bang! We had such a fun time exploring the ancient world, and then medieval world together. And then I was in bed for an entire month. My mother took care of our family, and we continued with school, but the thematic parts of the year didn't flourish like the first part.
Jasmyn was eager to learn what she missed, so during her junior/senior year, she went through this art history year on her own. Using the slides and my binder,she went through the entire course, periodically sharing her projects with us.
Though we had setbacks, I have many fond memories of this year when I was able to share some of my passion for art and architecture with our children. Some of our most enjoyable school moments came from the students projects that we filmed.
During Jasmyn’s senior year, she took my curriculum and did this art year on her own. She said she wanted to finish the year.
Later, Giselle asked for an art and music year, like the ones she missed out on when she was little. We did that during her senior year.
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