Beauty All Around-ART

I know there are dozens of museums near our home, but I have a three year old boy.  We did have an amazing private tour of Sotheby's Auction house this year sans the boy and photos pending.  I highly recommend it for New Yorkers as one of the only places you can really see great art for free (private tour not required, anyone can go) and the galleries are always changing.  

That said, at our house, art is usually playing with clay, glue, magazines, paint, cardboard, watching art related BrainPop movies and checking out art books.    Star (11) sometimes uses Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain exercises.  All of that is good and will continue, but this link has energized me.  We can study artistic masterpieces in a meaningful but easy way.  I think it will increase our awareness of beauty and our ability to observe.

http://www.squidoo.com/cmartiststudy

I can just pick pieces from one artist as my screensaver for a week at a time, so we get familiar with the style and body of work.  A no-peeking verbal narration will also hold the image together in our brains as will making our own attempts to copy the works.  There are also a couple of websites that provide coloring book pages of famous paintings and sculpture like this one:

http://www.color-me-online.com/masterpiece/paintings/index.html

Head to this site to print out a list of questions to consider when looking at a work of art:

http://www.gcms.k12.il.us/gcmsms/art/looking_at_art.htm