Europe Week: Bienvenue en France

And just like that our tour of Europe is almost over, but not without stopping off in magnificent France! France is famous the world over for its capital Paris and we will certainly come right back to this wonderful city but I wanted the Imaginators to see what else France has to offer! So we talked about the things we associate with France in general and food played a major part! But we also touched on fashion, the Eiffel Tower and of course the art!  

The Impressionist era happens to be my favourite so I was quite happy to chat about it for quite a few minutes LOL and I described for them how certain areas like Montparnasse became known as artist communities because artists from around the world would go there to live among other artists and create! I described how Impressionist art came about because the camera changed how artists saw themselves and their role in society! Artists started to think, "why should I try to realistically paint anything... is that not what a photograph is for?" They started experimenting with representing images the way they saw them and also moved away from painting stiff portraits of carefully positioned models and instead tried to capture scenes of ordinary life as it happened! So a scene of a cat at the foot of the Eiffel Tower for instance would never have been considered acceptable art before the Impressionists. LOL! 

For our French souvenir we created a scene from the book The Cat Who Walked Across France which they did over with Aunty Reiko, but they painted it like true Parisian artists in the Impressionist style using easels and canvases! Some of my little artists asked if they could make the Eiffel Tower light up as they have seen it in pictures sometimes and of course I was thrilled! 

My little campers and I also did the French tour and practiced our French words, "Salut" and "Au Revoir" then they created a simplified version of The Cat Who Walked Across France as well! Check out my little sweethearts in action!

The inspiration for our painting today was the book done at The Reading Garden... The Cat Who Walked Across France.