How do these three questions prompt you to do something similar to some of the suggestions made in the article you just read? Can you apply them to some of the pieces you found in your art collection?
If you’d like to practice your visual observation skills, join us Mondays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern when facilitators from our partner organization, Visual Thinking Strategies, come to our site to live-moderate student responses. Or click through the slide show above and choose an image and apply the questions on your own or with others.
Use Art as a Source of Strength
This spring, as museums in New York closed in response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Museum of Modern Art asked its staff members about art they have found themselves thinking of for solace, support and inspiration. “Is there a work in MoMA’s collection that has become particularly meaningful?” they asked. “Perhaps something unexpected or surprising?” Click through the slide show that resulted, called Art Is a Source of Strength. Do any of the works give you comfort? Why? Can you find a comforting work in your own collection?
Consider How Art Can Train Doctors and Police Officers
Art educators aren’t the only ones who think that looking closely and noticing detail in images can be good for your brain. In one 2016 article, “Off the Beat and Into a Museum: Art Helps Police Officers Learn to Look,” The Times explained how taking police officers to the Metropolitan Museum of Art helped train them to be more observant. In another from the same year, “What Doctors Can Learn From Looking at Art,” The Times explained how the same skills of observation could help train medical students. What other professions might learn something from going to art museums and closely studying the work? Why?
Go back to the collection you worked with as you read the main article. Can you find a piece there that would be useful to use to train police officers? Doctors? Why?
Take an “Awe Walk” in Nature
According to a study reported in the Times Health section, “Consciously watching for small wonders in the world around you during an otherwise ordinary walk could amplify the mental health benefits of the stroll.” Read the article and you’ll see that these walks draw on the same observation skills you have developed in this lesson, but this time you don’t need art to practice them. All you have to do is take a walk and pay attention. Here is how the researchers explain it:
“Basically, we told them to try to go and walk somewhere new, to the extent possible, since novelty helps to cultivate awe,” says Virginia Sturm, an associate professor of neurology at U.C.S.F., who led the new study. The researchers also suggested that the walkers pay attention to details along their walks, Dr. Sturm says, “looking at everything with fresh, childlike eyes.”
They emphasized that the awesome can be anywhere and everywhere, she says, from a sweeping panorama of cliffs and sea to sunlight dappling a leaf. “Awe is partly about focusing on the world outside of your head,” she says, and rediscovering that it is filled with marvelous things that are not you.
Explore Seven Elements of Art
A few years ago, The Learning Network ran a series called “Seven Elements of Art,” in which we paired videos from KQED Art School with New York Times articles on the visual arts to help students make connections between formal art instruction and our daily visual culture. Here are our lessons on space, shape, form, line, color, value and texture.
Choose one element, watch the video and skim the lesson on it, then use what you learn as you return one final time to your collection of art and find that element there.
About Lesson of the Day
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