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Welcome to Week 1 of the Big White Farmhouse’s Summer Integrated Humanities program! To ease into this project, we’re going to start with some light and airy choices.
ARTIST OF THE WEEK: JAN VAN GOYEN
Jan van Goyen was one of the most gifted landscapists in the Netherlands during the early 17th century.
“Many of his earlier pictures, from 1620 to about 1630, show the influence of Esaias van der Velde, his teacher in 1616. These landscapes are highly detailed, have strong local colour, and often serve as a stage for genre scenes. His characteristic style developed from the 1620s, when his compositions became simplified and his technique broadened. A use of low horizons gave his landscapes a Baroque sense of spatial expansiveness. His concern with rendering natural light and the depiction of subtle atmospheric effects, however, are the principal identifying features of van Goyen’s tonal landscapes.” (via)
If you’ve read here awhile, you know that I’m intrigued by cloud formations and photograph them often. I love the way van Goyen used color within the clouds! So beautiful and true to life.
A POEM AND A SIMPLE NATURE STUDY
Effie Lee Newsome was a Harlem Renaissance writer who mostly wrote children’s poems.
“Newsome was one of the first African American poets who primarily published poems for children. She was the author of one volume of poetry, Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers (The Associated Publishers, 1940), and she published numerous poems in the Crisis, Opportunity, and other leading journals of the Harlem Renaissance. She also edited the children’s column “Little Page” in the Crisis. Her poems helped her young readers celebrate their own beauty and recognize themselves in fairy tales, folklore, and nature.” (via)
Sky Pictures
by Effie Lee NewsomeSometimes a right white mountain
Or great soft polar bear,
Or lazy little flocks of sheep
Move on in the blue air.The mountains tear themselves like floss,
The bears all melt away.
The little sheep will drift apart
In such a sudden way.And then new sheep and mountains come.
New polar bears appear
And roll and tumble on again
Up in the skies so clear.The polar bears would like to get
Where polar bears belong.
The mountains try so hard to stand
In one place firm and strong.The little sheep all want to stop
And pasture in the sky,
But never can these things be done,
Although they try and try!
Things to Do…
- Photograph the sky everyday at the same time for a week.
- Learn the differences between ten basic cloud formations.
- Try your hand at solar printing and make unique botanical artwork.
A LITTLE SHAKESPEARE
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy by William Shakespeare and is one of his most popular and universally performed plays. Use the book to follow along with the play from The Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival.
MISCELLANEOUS RABBIT TRAILS…
+ Invest in and take a landscape watercolor class to paint those beautiful clouds you photographed.
+ Embark on a free audio course called A Survey of Shakespeare’s Plays. “This is a course on Shakespeare’s career, given at Brandeis University in the spring of 2010, by William Flesch. It covers several representative plays from all four genres: comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. We consider both the similarities and differences among those genres, and how his more and more radical experimentations in genre reflect his developing thought, about theater, about time, about life, over the course of his career.”
+ Read the poem, “The Cloud”, by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
I love this so much! Thank you for doing this series.
I’m so happy to hear that! Lots more to come!