The Art Room
Drawing and Painting with Emily Carr
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
The Art Room delights readers with a glimpse into the world of artistic expression, fun and freedom that renowned Northwest Coast artist Emily Carr created for her students.
For any child who loves art, it would be the gift of a lifetime to be able to study with a great contemporary artist. This delightful story-poem recreates the wonderful world of “the art room,” where famous Northwest Coast painter Emily Carr taught drawing and painting to children to support herself in the early 1900s. Filled with Carr’s love of animals, her insistence on painting from life and nature, and the sense of fun and freedom that she inspired in her young students, author Susan Vande Griek provides a fascinating glimpse into the life of this extraordinarily gifted artist. It is also a book bound to inspire today’s children to make an “art room” of their own.
Illustrator Pascal Milelli has brilliantly accomplished the very difficult job of painting a book about a painter. His rich style is a perfect foil for the work that Carr was doing at the time. This book reminds us of what a joyous experience art can be, and can serve as an inspiration to children who love to look at the world and try to reflect its beauty in their own creations. This edition features an updated font and an author’s note.
Key Text Features
biographical note
Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.7
Use illustrations and details in a story to describe its characters, setting, or events.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.4
Describe how words and phrases (e.g., regular beats, alliteration, rhymes, repeated lines) supply rhythm and meaning in a story, poem, or song.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vande Griek (A Gift for Ampato) pays tribute to her compatriot, Canadian artist Emily Carr (1871 1945), by imagining the experience of the children to whom Carr taught drawing and painting in the early 1900s. Her text is adulatory but trades on stereotypes: the art teacher, her hair in a messy bun, "danced and sang her way through the room... getting us to make paint fly and paper come alive." (Most of Carr's biographers agree that she was cantankerous.) While the images can be keen (an office building is filled with "typewriters talking business and tongues babbling news"), they don't build into a commanding text. Neither Miss Carr nor the narrator has personality, serving instead as a channel for the author's awe at the revelatory powers of art (at the end, the children "went out to see with eyes that were wide"). Milelli's (Rainbow Bay) oil paintings, however, possess a shining luminosity, whether depicting the classroom or excursions to the harbor. His use of color breathes life into the author's hackneyed themes. Ages 4-7.
