The theme at our Book Club meeting today was “paint”. Which child doesn’t love to paint – whether it is with acrylic or poster or material or watercolour paint, or mud or water!, and regardless of the canvas – painting is fun!
That was what our first story was about today – I ain’t gonna paint no more! by Karen Beaumont (ISBN: 9780358004158). A story about a boy that loved painting so much, he didn’t know when to stop!
The catchy rhyme makes for a fun read(or sing)-aloud, and is easily memorized by kids of all ages.
A little boy can’t help himself, he just needs to paint! And when his mom puts his paint away because it is unacceptable for him to paint on the floor or the ceiling or the wall or the curtains or the door, he turns to himself to create a masterpiece!
It is a brilliant exposition of the world seen through the eyes of a child – how they get caught up in the act and carried away in their own little world!
If your child hasn’t painted everything he/she sees before, you haven’t lived yet!!
The second book we read was The Noisy Paint Box by Barb Rosenstock (ISBN: 9780307978486), which is a wonderful picture book about “the colours and sounds of Kandinsky’s abstract art”.
Like all other children, Vasya Kandinsky had to study math, science and history, learning to be a “proper” Russian boy. Practicing piano, sitting prim and proper at grown up dinner parties, all made for a “proper” and “polite” world. But Vasya wasn’t happy… until he discovered art! The colours spoke to him and he started painting the sounds the colours made! Everybody thought he was silly, and it was expected of him to follow a “proper” career, so he put away “his noisy paint box and lived the way people expected”. But it was hard… Vasya couldn’t ignore the sounds of the colours in the streets, and neither could he ignore the colours the opera music was painting!
“Throughout his life, Kandinsky experienced colors as sounds, and sounds as colors, and bold, groundbreaking works burst forth from his noisy paint box”. This is a brilliant recording of how breaking free from box-thinking can explode into life changing art – adding intense feeling into personal work that can speak to others too.
You can [read the book!] and/or view some of Kandinsky’s work here!
Until next time (20 July 2019)!
Happy Reading!
