Look! Zoom in on Art!

How can we help children find interesting and illuminating ways of looking at paintings? Wolfe chooses eighteen paintings on different subjects and from different periods and invites children of between about seven and eleven years to look at them in a variety of ways. Sometimes we might look quickly to gain the full impact of a dynamic picture or, on other occasions, we might allow our eye to wander from a foreground to a distant landscape, perhaps homing in on a particular small detail. Changing the orientation of a work affects our perception of it: the trapeze artist in Curry’s ‘The Flying Codonas’ and the buildings in Sheeler’s ‘Windows’ look very different when viewed upside down.

Intriguing snippets of information are offered: the pie in Frederick Cotman’s ‘One of the Family’ was stuffed with coal so that it kept its shape for the days it took to paint it. Landseer, known for his paintings of animals with expressive eyes, exhibited his first painting at The Royal Academy when he was only twelve years old. And Ravilious only painted with watercolour, calling oil paint ‘too thick, like toothpaste’. The book has a wonderfully uncluttered look and the quality of the paper helps each picture shine out of the pages. So it would be a lovely book for a child to own as well as a good text to support art and English work at school. There is a useful ‘look it up’ section which tells us more about the artists and where the paintings discussed in the book can be seen. The clear text accompanying the quality illustrations seeks to genuinely involve young readers and to make them think and wonder. There are a lot of questions and ideas to stimulate good discussion. What would be another good name for Bridget Riley’s ‘Cataract 3’? How can you tell that it is an old-fashioned train in Eric Ravilious’ ‘Train Landscape’? Can a painting just be about shape and colour rather than meaning and memory?

Children are encouraged to think of themselves as artists as well as appreciators of art. They might, it is suggested, try sketching to record memories of a place as an alternative to taking photographs. Or they might take inspiration from Jan Steen’s ‘The Poultry Yard’ and use thick paint, collage or pastels to see if they can achieve the texture of feathers, tree bark and clothes in their own pictures. Applying this sort of effort in their own work is likely to encourage deeper scrutiny of the paintings they look at and greater appreciation of the technical and imaginative achievements of great painters.