Reading in Visual Art - Understanding the Artists Interpretation

 Our second artist model in Year 11 Visual Art this year is Margaret Aull. We are doing a similar process to when we looked at Henri Rousseau earlier in the year - blog post here - where I am getting the students to fill in a worksheet using a variety of media looking at the artists' work. The reading for the first artist model was an activity practising scanning and predicting - blog post here

The planning for the artist model work is on the class website - Henri Rousseau - Margaret Aull

The reading for Margaret Aull was of a very different style. We were reading her written piece that goes along with her painting " Fiji, Ever Fiji". This work, both the writing and the painting, was Margaret Aull's response to the coup and violence that was happening in Fiji at the time.

The first thing that we did as a class was to watch a YouTube video of the trouble and we had a class discussion about what a coup is and what the violence was about.

I gave the students a big version of the painting and a photocopy of the artist's words. Mr Milford, our literacy specialist, had taken a copy of the work away with him to work on a strategy for the students to understand what was being said. Here are his planning notes.

The students read through the work at the same time as I was reading it out to them - Link to document

We had the students highlight everywhere there was a "noun group" so they could highlight and see where these things were and we could talk about what each one meant. They then highlighted all the action words / verbs in green so they could relate those to what as being said.

We were referring back to the large poster that i have on my classroom wall that has all of these elements highlighted. Link to poster here.

What we are doing with this work now is putting it into our sketchbooks with our media experiments of Margaret Aull work. We had already done a bigger copy when we were practising mixing colours  - blog post here, so we are taking a double page up in our sketchbooks to be able to fit everything in, especially the large piece of written work.

With my example that I always make for the students, I didnt like the clean page so I put painted sections on it before sticking the work down and then splattered paint across everything afterwards.

Here is a picture of Mr Milford working with the students, going over the written work, while I highlighted the words on the screen as we went over them.

I found this a much harder reading activity to do with the students as it was dealing with thoughts and feelings and reactions to events where the normal reading that I do with my students is around facts - materials and processes, dates of things happening etc.