May has flown by so quickly, along with our fascinating study of the life and work of Vincent Van Gogh. His story is not the easiest or most inspiring to share with a young child. However, thanks to Home Ed, I have the freedom to coach such sensitive life lessons within a context of faith and hope.
This Sunflower is our second Van Gogh painting from last month. This one has taken a little longer to finish than Starry Night. However, I’m so proud of Sonshine’s determination to soldier-on, I’ve decided to post it as is. The first lesson he learnt in the process was, when you leave a painting half done, it’s hard to get the exact paint colour mixture next time round.
We started our art study with our go-to text Usbourne Book of Famous Artists, which we heavily complimented with a bio from the Van Gogh Museum and bits from Wiki. I then turned these articles into a nicely laid out handout, punctuated with a few of the artist’s most famous paintings.
We also listened to a fascinating National Gallery talk about the five Sunflower paintings in various museums around the world. Having seen Starry Night at MoMA last year, we ended up making two trips to the National Gallery to see the Sunflower. Our second trip to the Gallery was an attempt to circumvent Tate Britain’s expensive Van Gogh exhibition. We got to the National Gallery, only to find that the one painting we really wanted to see had been borrowed by the Tate!
For our application, we created an Artist Factfile and two lovely copies of our favourite Van Gogh pieces.
I think I can close this chapter now and move on to our next artist study.