Teaching the Renaissance period of art history can often be a snooze, for me and my students. The artists are old white men who my students can't relate to. The paintings are of rich people, landscapes, or decaying fruit. The names of people, places, and things are long and hard to remember. Now I have to say it's one of my favorite units to teach. Ms. Kaufman, the Grade 8 Humanities teacher, covers the historical/literary impact while I teach the different advancements in art making. The unit culminates in a Renaissance fair, where the kids can showcase the different topics they learned about in class. Ms. Kaufman has done a great job getting everyone excited for the fair - you can see more about it on her website, Super Ms. Kaufman. Most of this unit was designed by my predecessor (and now our HS art teacher) Ms. Chiu! I would have never come up with this unit on my own and I'm incredibly lucky to work alongside her this year. I frame the Renaissance around the concept that "everything old is new again." Renaissance artists created a trend; the Greeks and the Romans were in, the Middle Ages were out. We look at two major advancements in art - linear perspective and the development of the human figure. We also explore the three main painting techniques of the time - fresco, egg tempera, and oil paint. We review linear perspective, a mathematical drawing technique perfected by Brunelleschi during the Renaissance, which enables artists to depict 3D spaces in a 2D artwork. Students make a drawing inspired by Masolino's St. Peter Healing a Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha in their sketchbooks. (See what I mean? Long names.) Then I teach figure drawing, specifically the use of contrapposto ("counterpose"), and we draw from several student models. Naturally the first choice of a pose was the "dab" (pictured above). I love teaching figure drawing. It's interactive and fun, and I've found that it's a lesson that tends to stick. Students are more aware of the roundness, the proportions, and the movement of the human figure in their drawings after a quick figure drawing session.
After drawing, we move onto the painting techniques of the Renaissance. I'll share more about that in a later post - these are the lessons that really bring the Renaissance to life. They're messy and interactive ( and often smelly) and we've had a lot of fun the past two weeks creating our own Renaissance artworks. Do you teach the Renaissance? How do you make the Renaissance approachable and fun in the classroom? -Ms. Long
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AboutMy name is Ms. Long and I teach Gr. 5-8 visual art at American International School, Hong Kong in Kowloon Tong. Archives
August 2018
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