Art Conversation

Last night, I began my homeschooling night with TheWeeOne thinking it would be about drawing.
But she wasn’t interested – she wanted to play Bork Uncle or UpHigh.
While I drew the line there (BorkUncle is not schooling) I insisted that we didn’t have to be “boring” (her word).
She downshifted into

Let’s watch a moomie?!

and I countered with

Only if it’s instructional.

Some negotiations ensued and I drew the line at “learning about Vampires.” while she amazingly drew the line at “Creating clothes for her Vampire dolls.”
We wouldn’t budge.

I tried very hard to keep us in the realm of drawing…but I should have recognized her subtle shifts into moomies when 30 minutes later we had co-steered ourselves into watching Flamenco Dancing and Charlie Chaplin YouTube videos. Argh.

I did manage to right the ship (after I recognized she needed dinner) by asking a no-right-answer question.

What does The Scream, Flamenco Dancing, and that silent film all have in common?

After we discussed what “in common” meant – sheesh it is hard on a teacher when the pupil doesn’t have the necessary language eh?
We worked through that one and came back to the real question and with some prodding she agreed they were all Art.

Big breakthrough.

The rapid-fire discussion which followed delineated examples clearly NOT art…mountain climbing, baseball, food, money, etc.
What struck me, and the point of this post, is just how easily she zeroed in on what exists in the world which qualifies as ART – even without word-language…

What is ’emotion’?

And her resolutions lined up pretty well with what I would consider some fairly common assertions about art – at 6.
There is a very long conversation buried in this “discovery”, that even a 6 year old can discern very well what “Art” is, and further – even if the lines an individual 6 year old draws between subjects differ from other individual 6 year olds – at 6 she appears to be VERY reliable, consistent, and discerning.

There is an entire wing of Philosophy devoted to the subject (Aesthetics) and somehow at six one finds themselves knowledgeable enough to be on the front of that discussion? I think Ethics, Epistemology (maybe), and things like Physics and Mathematics would be hard pressed to say the same thing about their esoteric corners of conversation.

I took this while she ate some dinner and she winced…

probably NOT art.

But once she had learned how to do this to it…

yep – IS art.

If you have a young one in your immediate vicinity – give yourself an hour – allow the conversation to range far and wide and probe their understanding of art…I’d love to hear what you hear.
And besides that, it is fun.