Art History for Toddlers. - a humble place.

I don’t like Andy Warhol.

Whew. So glad to get that off my chest. While I’m at it, I don’t like Jackson Pollock either, but that’s another entry…maybe. At any rate, as a holder of a degree in art history, it’s kind of a faux pas for me to make a statement that I don’t like Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollock, two giants of the last century’s art scene.

But I don’t.

Okay, why did I bring up Andy Warhol? Because in the 1960s, he had a studio called “The Factory” where he basically had his posse mass-produce art. Lithographs, silkscreens, etc. So many of those Campbell’s soup and Marilyn Monroe Andy Warhol pieces you see were made in The Factory.

Where is this art history lesson/rabbit trail going?

A few months back, I started hanging up a blank piece of Bristol board on the end of our kitchen cabinets (I have a lot of art supplies left over from my college days) and set a jar of crayons in front of it so B can scribble to his heart’s content whenever he wants. Then I got the crazy idea of adding coloring pages to it. Not that he colors within the lines or even really understands the concept (which I kind of love), but when I found some fine art coloring pages online, I knew I had to use them. I had already taped a few pieces on the inside of the door of his kitchen cabinet, but I like to use any chance I can get to include art in his life. So I started printing out one coloring page along with a print of the original, colored-in work, and taped them on to the Bristol board each week. We now have a few Van Goghs and a Matisse with B scribbles all over them. I love toddler art.

This week, I turned it into his very own Factory by taping three pages to the Bristol board with the specific purpose of hanging them on E’s wall in his new office. We picked up a Ribba three-window frame at Ikea and I measured the windows, then printed out coloring pages in that size. Then I attached them to the Bristol board with painters tape (which is much easier to peel off than anything else) and let him have at it.

(And here’s B helping me take a picture of the Bristol board.)

And a week later, we had art.

He tends to like to color the colored pictures, and then go crazy on one of the coloring pages in one color for a little bit (as is evidenced by the orange explosion on American Gothic), before switching back to the paintings. But he scribbled enough to make a fine work of art for his daddy’s office.