This week combines all the things I love: learning activities, intrinsic motivation, observation and reflection!

1. Art & Activity: Interactive
Strategies for Engaging with Art
Week 2 of my second MoMA Learning Experience
Kate G.’s Activities

2. Symbolic Self-Portrait
I especially enjoyed listening to the
students in the MoMA video describe
why they chose the elements they did for
their symbolic self-portraits. I thought it
would be fun to do a quick portrait with
things found on my desk, reasoning that
the materials close at hand would prove
most representative of me. It was
important to me to represent my senses
by symbolizing eyes, a nose, and a
mouth—it did not occur to me until after
that it never crossed my mind to include
ears/hearing! My sense of touch is
represented by the textures here, and the
addition of the post-it message I keep on
my computer monitor, as well as the blue
speech coming out of my “mouth,”
represent my desire to learn, and my
desire to act and have an affect on the
world around me. It will come as no
surprise, considering the focus on text in
this picture, that I am passionate about
words, language, reading, and literacy.

3. Draw and Describe
Untitled by John Smith
Observations:
My son described this picture to me while I drew it. It was
interesting to think of his descriptions after the drawing
and describing was done and to consider how precisely
objective he was in his descriptions. For example, he
described “two tall and very skinny palm trees with leaves
at the top in the arrangement of flower petals but each
one with its own spikey details.” This was quite specific,
and accurately describes the picture, but even with such
specific descriptions, I had to imagine the orientation, how
“skinny” they were, and what kind of ground they were
on. As you can see, his description of the sun as “a setting
sun—circles within lines” was accurate from his
perspective, and made it into my drawing, but makes my
sun look much more like a sketch of Jupiter than a sun.

4. Draw and Describe
Soundsuit by Nick Cave
Observations:
This exercise would have been very different if I had been describing this picture to someone
with whom I did not already share a common descriptive language. I worked with my son,
and we did the exercise in an area where one of us viewed the work on the computer screen
while the other drew in an area where the describer could not see what the drawer what
creating.
Because of our common descriptive language, I was able to say things like “let’s begin by
picturing a person wearing Tron pants, who is standing with feet apart and fists down at his
sides like he is demanding something” and know that my son understood what that meant.
My description got more murky to my son when I talked about the gramophone. I realized as
after I began to describe it, that it was something he may not know. I had to consider what he
would understand and relate to. In the spirit of the exercise, I attempted to describe it by
shape and placement, rather than dig into where he may have seen a gramophone.

5. Blind Contour
Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh
Observations:
I noticed details in the painting that I
had not paid close attention to before,
especially the connectedness of the
brush strokes and the “waves” that are
repeated in the plants and sky that I
focused on. While I had expected to
end up with a complete picture, I
found that the two minutes went by
very quickly, and that my focus was on
quite specific areas of the painting. I
found it liberating (and quite relaxing)
that I could not look at my drawing
while making it. I would have been
frustrated if my expectation had been
to recreate the painting instead of to
focus on details in the painting.