Meet the Masters is an art program at Corpus for grades 4-8. Our wonderful parent volunteers come in to teach a focused lesson on one artist, then later the same week, the kids do a hands-on project imitating that artist’s style. Earlier this year was M.C. Escher. This month is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. I really hope that when the MTM program got together for a meeting, they chose this artist just for the comedy of watching all our kids try and say his name. Turns out, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s work with posters is very well known (especially among young women decorating their first apartments).
I’d like to highlight the sheer bravery and tenacity of our parent volunteers. It is not easy. In the lesson portion, they field some of the strangest, most severely literal comments, the kind of comments that seem like answers to questions that weren’t asked, and wouldn’t really have much of an answer if they had been asked: “He knows how to draw stairs because he had stairs in his house,” (Escher). “The monkey would have eaten the mango so the painting isn’t really true,” (Frida Khalo). “He had season tickets to the ballet,” (Edgar Degas). Try responding to these in a manner that isn’t clumsy.
Then there’s the hands-on portion. This is when our parent volunteers dance awful close to the line between brave and...really, really brave. For the last project on M.C. Escher, the kids made tessellations. Tessellations are pretty common in the kid-art world, but these Meet the Masters tessellations were colored in with loose chalk powder.
See? Really, really brave.
But that was last time. This time, for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the kids got paint. Oy. And, characteristic to Toulouse-Lautrec, they were working with the primary colors, so in addition to giving them paint, the kids were asked not to mix the colors. Oy times two.
To complement the overly literal comments that come up in the lesson, the hands-on portion is taught in a very literal way. The art projects are broken down into steps: draw a dot in the middle of the page. From that dot, draw two lines three inches long equally distanced between the dot and the edges of the paper. Above those lines, but an inch toward the middle, draw a nose. This is the angle at which you hold a paint brush. This is how much paint you need on the brush.
Everything is literal until that paintbrush/pencil/crayon hits the paper. Enter the imaginative and the untamable.
Over the course of the day, these parent volunteers receive 5 grades. That is 5 hours straight, 5 times doing the same lesson, 5 times telling our kids not to mix the paint, which of course, is not counting the subsequent reminders.
So, a big, big thank you to these brave parents. I’m not sure any of the teachers could be bribed to do what you do. And for everyone else, if you ever want to know what it’s like trying to wrangle 32 students with wet paint brushes in their hands, come on down!