Paint and Pages

How do you define the fools and the wise? You can’t. Perspective and perspective alone does that. 
The wise think the fools are fools. The fools think the wise are fools. The whole saga ends and nobody discovers who was what.
-Emit Eht

Ratna Srivastava

This week, I introduced my preschool students to the art of Vasya Kadinsky. “The Noisy Paint Box” tells the story of Kadinsky’s life and his unique relationship with art and sound.

Something I appreciated about this book was how dismissive Kadinsky’s family was of his artistic pursuit. His family thought his art was foolish (why can’t you paint flowers or people?) and a waste of time (you need to work on math).

Kadinsky had a complicated relationship with his art as a result. He went long lengths of time without creating art. He became a lawyer. He rediscovered his passion of art and then ventured into unchartered territory by creating art in a way that seemed foolish to many. He painted sounds. He didn’t want to paint people and fruit. He wanted to paint the colors of the sounds he heard.

Before we began creating art, the students and I played instrumental music and danced to the sound. It was fun seeing students express themselves to music.

After dancing, we kept the music on and painted to music-just like Kadinsky! I loved seeing all the different ideas and sounds come to life.

Some of Kadinsky’s paintings looked like boxes with dark lines. Preschool students have been studying shapes so we glued colorful rectangle collages and added a black line detail.

Just like Srivastava says you can’t define the fools and the wise. Let us pledge to never discourage the art of a child and instead encourage them by putting a noisy paint box in their hands.