Sandra K. Friday
One strategy for beginning the unit might be to read the poem,
The Brooklyn Museum of Art
, by Billy Collins, former poet laureate of the United States, in which he describes simply stepping over the velvet rope and walking into a Hudson River landscape painting. He begins:
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I will now step over the soft velvet rope and walk directly into this massive Hudson River painting and pick my way along the Palisades with this stick I snapped off a dead tree.
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I will skirt the smoky, nestled towns and seek the path that leads always outward until I become lost, without a hope of ever finding my way back to the museum. 1
At the same time students are reading the poem, I will show them a slide of
Mt Ktaadn
by Frederic Church at the Yale University Art Gallery, and they will have the visual experience that Collins is describing in his poem. As students are following the narrator wending his way through the landscape, they will practice the
art rendering
exercise I described: identifying objects in the painting; then colors, hues, and tones; and finally the composition of the painting. I will ask them to determine what aspect of American culture Frederic Church was trying to represent through objects, colors and composition. Perhaps they will brainstorm why a person would want to walk into this kind of painting and lose himself. I will ask them to make a judgment as to how successful they think Church was in representing the American landscape, and why or why not.