Paint Like Van Gogh

Van Gogh is my favorite artist of all time so I could never spend a week exploring master artists without including him. His paintings are so expressive, so full of emotion and create such a sense of urgency that it is hard to imagine how anyone who looks at them can help but fall in love with them on sight!

Van Gogh also lived a hard life. He had many trials and took a relatively long time to find art as his calling. He was also a very sensitive and vulnerable person that tended to delve wholeheartedly into whatever he set out to do, so the fact that he only ever sold one painting out of the over 2000 paintings he did over his life is one of the many sad truths of his story.

But in our short time together this morning at Paint Like the Masters I wanted the children to picture him not as a man who battled with sadness, but as a boy growing up with siblings, who played outside, who grew up into a man who loved nature and would write and paint fanatically about the stars in the sky. A man of many wonders who used art to express himself but also who attempted to make others see things as he did. We see it Vincent, we see it :)

Before we got into painting like Van Gogh, we took a little break to go outside, have some snacks and play a game or two that Van Gogh might have played as a boy in the Netherlands. To my surprise I found that Eierlopen... uuh hum... that's egg and spoon (lol) was quite popular. So egg and spoon we played!

Then it was back inside to Paint Like Van Gogh... Our task, one of his beautiful paintings of sunflowers.