music to painting

Today we are painting to music. We put on two songs from Charles Mingus's record Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus: "II B.S." and "Better Get Hit in Yo' Soul". The second the music comes on Sachie shouts out "Blue!" -- this sound/color association then triggers a memory that she uses as a subject for her painting. Skuli, Silas, and Finn all take to dancing while painting -- their brush marks flow with their movements. Ranger paints as though he's playing the instruments he hears -- hitting the paper with dots when he hears drum beats and painting furiously when the saxophone is riffing like crazy. When the songs end and the paintings are finished, we take some time to look at and talk about each painting. What follows are some of the comments made during our critiques:



Ranger's painting:

Sachie: I see it's really full.
Finn: I see a lot of dots.
Sachie: A dot would sound like "dunt" "dunt".







Sachie's painting:

Sachie: This is of me and my mom. We're going to the swimming pool and there was a rainbow and lots of dots in the water.
Skuli: What are the dots?
Sachie: They're the drops of water.
Silas: The little ones?
Sachie: Well, I picked up a brush and splashed it like when I was splashing in the water.

Finn's painting:

Finn: I was painting some parts to look slow when the music was slow and fast parts when the music was fast.
Sachie: The blue part looks like the pool in mine.
Ranger: I see lines.
Finn: But it's not much of a line because it's bendy too.
Ranger: Lines can be like that.


Skuli's painting:

Silas: I see some black.
Sachie: It looks cool down here because it looks like a giant!
Finn: We all used blue because of the music and because of the paint we had.
Sachie: I used it because of the pool.

Silas's painting:

Silas: Me and my dad were about to go in the rainbow but we saw all the cool playgrounds you could go in here. I painted all of my hands and that's how I did it.
Sachie: What are these sparkles on the bottom?
Silas: They're the guards . . . the music changed my painting. I wasn't listening to the music all of the time because I had to get other colors -- but then I went back to the music.