Language Value
November 2018, Volume 10, Number 1 pp. 45-66
ISSN 1989-7103
Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art
appreciation in primary school
Ruth Breeze
Instituto Cultura y Sociedad, Universidad de Navarra, Spain
ABSTRACT
Fine arts offer opportunities for multimodal approaches in education. Museums and galleries are now
aware of their social role, and provide outreach activities designed to bring an understanding of art to a
wider public. Their websites offer educational material for school children, showing how artistic
knowledge and sensitivity can be cultivated with young age groups. However, little attention has been
paid to such didactic material by discourse analysts interested in multimodality. This paper builds on
Swales’s (2016) article on the genre of the single image account (SIA), which centres on texts about
famous paintings written by experts for a general readership. Here, I focus on SIAs for didactic purposes,
examining pedagogical resources on the National Gallery’s website. Accessible SIAs are combined with
suggestions to enhance primary school pupils’ learning through creative activities across a variety of
modes. Guidelines are provided for writing SIAs for educational purposes in other contexts.
Keywords: primary education, art education, multimodality, genre analysis, discourse analysis, single
image analysis
I. INTRODUCTION
Over the last thirty years, the role of museums and art galleries in many countries has
been transformed, so that we can now talk of their key role in bringing culture to wider
audiences and promoting lifelong learning. As far as children are concerned, it is clear
that museums and galleries have a special function as educational spaces outside the
classroom that offer a rich learning environment (Arbués and Naval 2014). With this in
mind, leading art galleries around the world have developed an increasingly diverse
range of educational and outreach activities designed to bring the works they house to a
larger public, and to promote a deeper understanding of art among different target
groups (Tishman et al. 2007). As a result, many art galleries have devised educational
programmes of activities for children of different ages, including hands-on workshops
(Brooklyn Museum 2018), special guided tours for different target groups, or invitations
to respond in visual form to the works of art on display (National Gallery 2018).
Outside the English-speaking world such adaptations were generally less common,
Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors
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Ruth Breeze
possibly for budgetary reasons, but there are signs that this is changing (Fontal Merillas
2009). Most national and regional governments now acknowledge that investment in
national heritage is an important goal, and within this, that it is important to promote an
understanding of this legacy among the younger generation. For this reason, it is useful
to look at the educational strategies adopted in countries like the USA and the UK,
which have a longer tradition of bringing culture to a wider audience. This may help
institutions in other countries to develop resources along similar lines, either by
adapting them for use in local languages, or by devising activities and materials in
English for an international audience, or for local schools involved in Content and
Language Integrated Learning (Breeze and García Laborda 2016). One of the simplest
and least expensive educational strategies to emulate and implement is the preparation
of material based on specific artists or individual works of art, adjusted for different age
groups. Such material can be used by schools to prepare their visits, or as an aid when
studying a particular topic. If it is appropriately adapted to the age groups in question, it
can help children learn to experience and appreciate art (Harris and Zucker 2016), and
might also act as a stimulus for creative responses of different kinds, thus involving the
principle of learning-by-doing (Martikainen 2017).
One such resource is provided in the National Gallery, London, as part of its ongoing
educational outreach programme (National Gallery 2018). It consists of sets of notes for
primary school teachers, each of which has an explanation of one painting, accompanied
by other information (such as background details about the artist’s life, his patrons, or
the subjects of the painting), and in most cases, ideas for educational activities designed
to help children respond to the painting, or encourage them to develop their own
creative skills. These resources are linked to the “Take one picture” project that the
Gallery has carried out for many years in collaboration with primary schools. Each year,
a particular picture from the National Gallery is chosen, and the Gallery provides
educational material and short courses for teachers about it. At the end of each season,
the Gallery hosts an exhibition showing some of the work that schoolchildren have
produced in response to the painting chosen. This programme has several advantages
for our present purposes: the National Gallery provides a considerable volume of
material designed specifically for primary school teachers, this is always focused on a
single work of art, and it is expressly intended to be used by the teachers both to
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
develop their pupils’ appreciation of art and to foster their creativity. In this paper, my
aim is to explore how these “Notes for Teachers” materialise these aims discursively,
and to relate this to the bibliography on art education and museum pedagogy, in the
hope that it will be interesting for theorists, but also useful for those involved in art
education elsewhere.
In this paper, my main approach is discourse analytical, informed by genre theory.
Genres serve typical socially recognised communicative purposes, and are in some
sense conventionalised
(Bhatia 2004). Genres provide a window onto professional
practices, and onto the values and epistemology of particular disciplinary communities.
By finding out what is stable, or at least frequent, in particular genres, we can learn
more about the community that produced them, how they think and how they
communicate. Within this, in the concrete case at hand, it is striking that from the
perspective of applied linguistics, relatively little attention has been paid to the area of
educational and popularising discourses about the visual arts. Despite the intense
interest in multimodality and text-image interplay that has developed over the last thirty
years (Bateman 2014), most work in the educational field has centred on how picture
books create meaning through convergent or complementary semiotic modes
(Nicolajeva and Scott 2001, Salisbury and Styles 2012), or how textbooks, infographics
or websites exploit intermodal effects (Unsworth 2006). Little research is available that
explicitly deals with the way the written mode deals with the visual one, or how
language is used to talk about (rather than with or alongside) pictures.
One honourable exception to this is Swales’s ground-breaking paper “Configuring
image and context: writing ‘about’ pictures” (2016), which examines one-page accounts
of single masterpieces intended for educated adult readers. In this paper, I build on
Swales’s analysis in two ways: first, by examining texts about art written for primary
school teachers, in the knowledge that they are likely to incorporate aspects that may
help these readers to arouse children’s interest in art; and second, by looking at the
practical suggestions available alongside most of these texts, which propose classroom
activities and project work to stimulate children’s creativity in a variety of media. I will
then use this analysis to build a heuristic that could be useful for anyone who needs to
write popular educational material to accompany works of art.
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II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Works of art in museums and galleries are almost invariably accompanied by written
accounts, whether in the form of labels or brief explanations, or in longer formats such
as press releases, exhibition catalogues, popular art books and critical analyses. To
these, we must add websites and audioguides, which also provide abundant information
in different modes. Within this, the single image analysis (SIA) provides a central focus
for analysis, since this is a genre found across many of these different publications, and
one which in some sense holds the key to art appreciation and education. As Swales
(2016) notes, writing about pictures involves first
“reading” the picture, and then
sequencing the description of the image itself with discussion of any relevant aspects of
the context
(subject, artist, period, movement, etc.). Although the twofold aim of
description and discussion might seem to lend itself to some kind of general-specific
macrostructure (in this case, realised in terms of first context, then description), or
perhaps a specific-general structure
(starting from the image and moving to a
commentary encompassing aspects of its background), this does not seem to be usual
among art writers. As Swales (2016) shows, what seems to be typical is a kind of
“dialectical tacking” (Geertz 1980: 103) between the image, on the one hand, and the
background, on the other. Regarding move structure, Swales’s own analysis of the SIA
identifies this zigzagging between image and background as perhaps the characteristic
hallmark of art writing for a general public. In the alternation between image and
context, most of Swales’s examples seemed to set out from the context, and then to
intersperse description of the image with discussion of different aspects of background,
but the amount of text dedicated to each, and the length of each
“turn”, varied
considerably from one text to another.
Beyond this, Swales also analyses five other features that he found to be typical of the
SIAs in his corpus. These are:
o comparisons (with other works, or with other artists, styles or periods);
o a relative scarcity of intertextual references (i.e. to the writings of other critics or
art historians);
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
o complex epistemic patterning, in which speculation is prominent and in which
the writer offers “contested (or at least contestable) interpretations of the art
objects as well as speculations about the artists and the factors that may have led
to the production and construction of their works”;
o frequent use of brackets, to introduce information such as important dates, the
whereabouts of paintings, and explanations of materials or techniques;
o positive evaluative language, used to bring out particular qualities of the painting
or painter.
In this paper, I will use the general principles of genre analysis (Bhatia 2004, Swales
1990), and the previous work by Swales (2016) to build a description of the SIAs
intended for primary school teachers. From the general principles of genre analysis
(Swales 1990, Bhatia 2004), it would be expected that these texts will bear some kind of
family resemblance to the SIAs analysed in Swales (2016), but that their slightly
different communicative purpose will condition their content and structure in different
ways. My analysis is complemented with an overview of the different types of activity
proposed with a view to enhancing children’s experience of art. In the last section, I will
provide a heuristic intended to guide writers who need to produce texts about art for
educational purposes, based on my observations and analysis.
III. TEXTS AND METHOD
My study focuses on 25 sets of “Notes for Primary Teachers”, published in the
“Teachers’ notes” section of the National Gallery website (National Gallery 2018). The
Notes had all been prepared for the “Take one picture” scheme that has been running
annually since 1995. Notes centring on an entire exhibition, rather than a single image,
were excluded from this study. In each case, a single picture from the collection was
selected, Notes were prepared, and schoolchildren from all over the country were invited
to submit examples of how a class or year group used this particular painting to inspire
creative learning. The children’s work was then exhibited by the Gallery in the popular
“Take one picture” exhibition.
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All of the Notes included in the present study focused on a single image, and 17 were
principally pictures of human subjects, while there were five landscapes, two seascapes
and one still life. The Notes were downloaded from the website and read carefully, in
order to note structural organisation and any other features that they had in common.
They were then re-read and coded, and illustrative examples of text selected for each of
the main features identified.
IV. GENRE FEATURES
Each of the Notes consists of a SIA of variable length (generally around 2000 words,
but sometimes much shorter), accompanied by the image of the painting itself,
sometimes with one or two other images, such as close-up shots of details within the
painting, or other paintings using a comparable technique or subject. After the main
text, most of the Notes include a list of activities that could be used with primary school
pupils, sometimes graded according to age or curricular objectives.
The text itself is often subdivided by means of headings such as “About the artist”,
“About the painting”, “About the subject”. However, the Notes vary greatly: in some
cases, the writer has preferred to include a single section with the title “About the
painting”, while in others original headings are inserted, such as “Artistic licence” or
“The end of an era”.
Although some of the aspects identified by Swales (2016) were also found here, certain
features are prominent in the Notes that do not appear in his analysis. We might
speculate that some of these, at least, are related to the fact that these texts are written
for a specific target: primary school teachers who are going to use the picture with their
class.
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
Graph 1. Features included in Notes on paintings of human figures (blue) and landscapes/seascapes/still-
lifes (red).
In what follows, I shall discuss some of the more prominent features identified in most
of the Notes.
IV.1. Tacking between image and context
Like the SIAs analysed by Swales, these texts interweave descriptions of the painting
with explanations about the personal, historical and artistic background. The following
example from the notes about “The hay wain” by John Constable serve to illustrate this
back-and-forth movement, which seems to take the reader skilfully in and out of the
painting, emulating the way a guide might point to features of the picture and interlace
these observations with explanations of different kinds. In the example, I have italicised
references to the image:
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(1) Before Constable was born his parents lived in the mill house and afterwards the family
continued to live in the Suffolk countryside - the setting for this painting. Constable drew much
of his initial inspiration for scenes such as this one from memories of the childhood he had spent
in the area. The wisps of smoke curling from the chimney of the house, and the woman beside it,
drawing water from the river, give the scene a harmonious, domesticated atmosphere. In the
background, in the yellow and green fields, dappled with sunlight, we can see (
) The cloudy,
wind-swept sky would seem to indicate the possibility of rain and certainly evokes the English
summertime weather. Constable actually made many of the cloud studies for this painting on
Hampstead Heath in London. (Notes to Constable’s “The hay wain”)
This free-flowing approach to textual organisation is most pronounced in those sets of
Notes which do not have internal subheadings. In others, where the text is subdivided
into sections with titles like
“About the painting”,
“About the subject”, etc., the
organisation is more constrained, but even here the tendency to zigzag is perceptible.
For example, in the notes on Turner’s
“The fighting Temeraire”, a section on
background accomplishes seamless moves from context to image, as in the following
example:
(2) The development of steam power was recognised at the time as enormously important, but as
with any new technology, responses ranged from the wildly enthusiastic to the deeply
pessimistic. These diverse reactions in a time of change are reflected in The Fighting Temeraire,
where Turner exaggerates the stark contrast between the two vessels, which stand for the old
order and the new. As the sun sets on the horizon to the right, the new moon rises in the sky.
(Notes to Turner’s “The fighting Temeraire i”)
As this example illustrates, the descriptions provided in the notes are rarely just
descriptions, in the sense that they have a didactic purpose - to draw our attention to
particular aspects of the painting and bring out their significance. When the writer tells
us that the sun sets on the right as the new moon rises, he/she is not simply providing a
routine description of the painting: he/she is drawing our attention to features that we
might otherwise not have seen, and bringing out the relevance of these in the light of the
background he/she has just explained. The written text largely follows the script of a
guided tour, in which the guide/writer points to aspects of interest within the painting
and relates these to external issues (themes, symbolism, artist, subject).
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
Sometimes, the description of the picture has to be more explicit than a guide would be,
in terms of what goes where, as the text has to perform the role of the pointing finger to
show where the points of interest lie, and also has to bring out the importance of visual
aspects (such as colour or line) that might not need to be indicated so explicitly with an
audience standing nearby:
(3) There is story-telling in the picture, but we notice the setting first: the early morning sky, the
sun (…). Next we may take in the bustle of the port (…). We may have to look quite closely to
spot the Queen. Claude helps us to do this through the composition of the picture. He leads our
eyes to the group of people on the steps on the right: they are at an intersection of a line of
perspective (the step) and the strong vertical of the far left column of the palace. The queen is
marked out in the group by the bold colours of her clothes: a pinkish-red tunic, a royal blue cloak
and a golden crown. (Notes to Claude’s “Seaport with the embarkation of the Queen of Shebaii”)
The “tacking” noted by Swales (2016: 25) can thus be related to the didactic function of
teaching people how to look (Tishman et al. 2007: 61-62): as we follow the text, we can
experience the process of slowing down, looking, pausing and looking again that is so
important in the development of our powers of observation. As Fontal Merillas explains
(2009: 84), one of the challenges in art education is to teach strategies to develop
receptivity, to guide people so that they can feel their way into a work of art. The
recursive describing and explaining encapsulated in the Notes is a textual representation
of this expert process of pointing, sharing and bringing out the wealth of meaning
within each picture for the novice observer.
As Graph 1 shows, the Notes also contained some other recurring themes. These are
explained below, with examples where appropriate.
IV.2. Explanation of historical background
One feature which is prominent in the examples that Swales (2016) uses, but which he
does not analyse in any depth, is the presentation of historical background. In the Notes,
historical information is present in most cases, and tends to be pitched at a popular
level, bringing out direct connections with the picture:
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(4) The 1760s saw the beginning of the Industrial Revolution which went on to dramatically
affect the lives of all British people. Wright produced many paintings of industrial environments
with strong contrasts of light and shadow, such as blacksmiths’ forges, glass blowing houses and
blast furnaces. (Notes to Wright’s “An experiment on a bird in the air pump iii”)
Background is also typically provided in the form of explanations of terminology used
in the title or description of the picture:
(5) The parading figures in Rubens’ composition depict a Roman ‘triumph’. A triumphal
procession was the greatest honour that could be given to a Roman general and was usually
awarded to celebrate a great military campaign or victory.
(Notes to Rubens’ “A Roman
triumphiv ”)
In general, we can assume that the person writing the Notes assumes little knowledge on
the part of the reader, or at least, that he/she wishes to make the information as clear,
explicit and straightforward as possible for teachers who are going to use the painting
with primary school children.
IV.3. Appeal to human interest
Perhaps with the primary school target audience in mind, the writers of the Notes often
try to engage human interest in the people represented in the picture. This is represented
in Graph 1 as engagement with characters, but also within the various types of narrative
that appear in the Notes. Intuitively the appeal to human interest would seem to promote
the forging of a personal connection, so that observers learn to relate more deeply to the
image (Tishman et al. 2007: 64-65):
(6) The organ’s sound presumably has inspired the caged bullfinch to sing, which in turn has
provoked the predatory cat to leap hopefully up the back of the boy’s chair. The two girls seem
unaware of this small drama, while baby Thomas, rusk in hand, has eyes only for the cherries
held out by his elder sister.
(Notes to Hogarth's “The Graham childrenv ”)
The Notes also encourage readers to take an interest in the artist and his life:
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
(7) In 1630, at the age of 53, Rubens married again. To everyone’s surprise he did not marry into
the nobility, but chose Helene Fourment, the 16-year-old daughter of a respectable merchant
family. Rubens was clearly bowled over by his new wife with whom he has five children, and
she figures in numerous portraits, including a version of ‘The Judgement of Paris’ in which she
appears as Venus. (Notes to Rubens' “An autumn landscape with a view of Het Steenvi ”)
Within the cultivation of human interest, the child perspective has a particular
importance. This perspective appears in various ways, including the explanations of life
in the painter’s time:
(8) Boys would be apprenticed around the age of 14 and would need to train for some years. As
well as learning to draw and paint they needed to master various practical and craft skills. Once
trained, they could join the painters’ guild and set up as independent masters with their own
assistants and apprentices and hope to gain prestigious commissions. (Notes to Pintoricchio's
“Penelope with the suitorsvii ”)
But the account of the people in the painting, if these are children, also tends to be a
special focus of interest:
(9) The young girl on the right of the painting holds a hoop and stick. The hoop for such a toy
might be made of metal or wood, and the object of the game was to keep the hoop upright while
rolling it along the ground with the stick. Skilled players could do this for lengthy amounts of
time and some performed tricks. (Notes to Renoir's “The umbrellasviii ”)
(10) The painting has a jolly atmosphere with the three children making a lot of noise and
enjoying themselves. And it’s painted in a realistic way, so you can imagine being in this room
with them, singing along and hearing their laughter. (Notes to Molenaer's “Two boys and a girl
making music xi ”)
IV.4. Use of embedded narrative
One aspect that is particularly prominent in these SIAs, presumably because of their
didactic purpose and young wider audience, is narrative, which again can involve either
telling the story depicted, or recounting incidents from the life of the painter, the
commissioning of the painting, or its subsequent reception (see Human interest, above,
and Graph 1).
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Ruth Breeze
(11) Odysseus is the figure coming through the door disguised by the Goddess Athena as an old
beggar with his staff. On the wall above Penelope’s head are his bow and quiver of arrows.
Penelope sets up an archery contest saying she will marry the suitor who can string the bow and
win the contest. No one is strong enough to string the bow except Odysseus himself. He reveals
his identity and the couple are reunited. (Notes to Pintoricchio's “Penelope with the suitors”)
This narrativising tendency also extends to the story of objects in the painting:
(12) This drinking-horn, made in 1565, still exists and is on show at the Amsterdam Museum in
Amsterdam. It belonged to the Saint Sebastian Archers who were the likely patrons of the
painting. On special occasions the officers would gather to feast and the horn would be filled
with wine and ceremoniously passed among them. (Notes to Kalf's “Still life with the drinking
horn of the St Sebastian’s archers’ guild, lobster and glassesx ”)
However, it should also be noted that the Notes are intended for people working within
a rather broad age range, which means that the narratives offered are not geared to a
particular age group. It seems that the teachers in each case would be responsible for
adapting the contents and language of the story to their students’ level and interests.
IV. 5. Positive evaluative language
In his analysis, Swales (2016) pointed to evaluative language as one of the features that
seems to be present in essence in SIAs, but which is subject to individual (or possibly
cultural) variation. Here, since the writers are anonymous, it would be difficult to trace
any cultural effects. There is certainly evaluative language in almost all the Notes, but it
is administered very sparsely and soberly. Thus we are told that “The stonemason’s
yard” is “often regarded as Canaletto’s masterpiece”, while Turner is “one of Britain’s
best-known landscape painters”.
A more interesting kind of evaluation tends to be delivered through the wording of the
descriptions themselves: we read that Pintoricchio “cleverly gives us a sense of the
whole narrative” by showing different episodes of Odysseus’ story in the foreground
and background, while Turner’s sailing ship is “painted delicately in light tones” before
a “glorious sunset”. The focus of these SIAs is on observation and response to the
image, but there are none of the “enthused evaluations” reported by Swales (2016: 32),
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
and objective observation is generally preferred to emotional evocations of aesthetic
effects.
IV.6. Using the five senses
With the target audience in mind, some of the Notes draw on senses other than sight in
order to suggest ways of presenting the picture. The most usual strategy is through the
evocation of sound, as in example (10) cited above describing Molenaer's picture, or
example (13) below:
(13) The picture is not only full of riotous colour and movement but also full of imaginable
sounds: you can almost hear the growls of the animals; the horns and pipes being blown by
musicians; the pounding of footsteps. (Notes to Rubens’s “A Roman triumph”)
Other senses are occasionally engaged in these SIAs, particularly touch, in the context
of temperature:
(14) How cold is it? Cold enough for ice that is safe for skating - and for a large horse to walk
on it! (Notes to Beerstraaten's “The castle of Muiden in winter xiii ”)
But interestingly, multisensory response is encouraged in the activities listed at the end
of the Notes much more frequently than it is used in the actual SIA (see Graph 1).
IV.7. Explanation of symbolism
A further didactic strategy that is prominent in these Notes is the special emphasis on
explaining the symbolic aspects of many of the paintings. Some of these glosses are
rather straightforward, like the following one, which boils down to “dogs can symbolise
faithfulness”:
(15) In art, dogs are often used to symbolise marital fidelity, so perhaps Veronese was making a
comment by including them in his painting. (Notes to Veronese, “The family of Darius before
Alexander xii ”)
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However, in other cases the writer attempts a more elaborate explanation involving
several layers of meaning, including aspects of technological, social and cultural history
that shed light on specific aspects of the painting:
(16) Black was an expensive dye at this time and was only worn by wealthy people: it also
signified Melancholy and indicated that the wearer had introspective intellectual qualities, which
were much admired at the time. (Notes to Holbein's “The ambassadors”)
IV.8. Asking questions and speculating
As Graph 1 shows, one feature that many of the Notes have in common is their use of
questions or speculative suggestions, which overlaps with what Swales (2016: 28-29)
calls
“contested interpretations”. Although in his texts this function was frequently
associated with epistemic elements, most particularly hedging and various
hearsay/mindsay evidentials, in the Notes it is mainly represented by direct questions:
(17) Next to this jar stands an imposing figure robed in red, quite different to all the others
present. With his hand outstretched towards us he is the only person to look out of the painting
and make eye-contact with us. Is he asking us a question or perhaps inviting us to take a closer
look? (Notes on Wright’s “An experiment on a bird in the air pump”)
In most cases, these questions have no answer, but sometimes an answer is proposed,
usually an answer in line with the age of the prospective audience and their presumed
response to the picture:
(18) Something, or somebody, has caught the attention of the little girl on the right, and the
woman on the left. What, or whom, are they looking at? Perhaps they are looking at us? It is
almost as if we are standing in the picture with them. (Notes on Renoir's “The umbrellas”)
In a few cases, a more sophisticated analysis is presented, which seems to address the
teachers rather than their (primary age) students. In this case, more complex hedging
devices (“tend to believe”) and uncertainty is stressed (“we cannot be sure”) in order to
spark curiosity:
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
(19) But which man in the painting is Alexander? (…) Art historians tend to believe that the man
in crimson is Alexander, because he is more central to the composition, and is the more
conspicuously dressed of the two, but we cannot be sure. The possibility of confusion is
necessary if we are to understand the queen mother’s mistake. Veronese has left us with a
mystery, and after nearly 500 years, we are still not sure of the answer. (Notes to Veronese, “The
family of Darius before Alexander”)
IV.9. Explanation of symbolism
A further aspect that may be particularly prominent because of the educational function
of these texts is their insistence on aspects of technique and material.
(20) Seurat had a special interest in optics and the science of colour, particularly the writings of
the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul.
(...) Chevreul stated that complementary colours,
opposites on the colour wheel, enhanced each other when placed side-by-side. The use of
complementary contrasts can be seen everywhere in the picture, from small brushstrokes to
larger areas of colour. For example, in the predominantly green riverbank, there are strokes of
the complementary colours pink and green, and also some bright yellow and violet, and orange
and blue. (Notes to Seurat, “Bathers at Asniqresxiv ”)
This emphasis on topics such as primary colours here certainly reflects the primary
school curriculum. However, other explanations of material and technique are more
sophisticated. In the Notes on Wright’s painting “An experiment on a bird in the air
pump”, the question of dark and light is emphasised, and brought into a wider art
historical context:
(21) Wright used screens in his studio to control the light and here he has displayed a dazzling
arrangement of light and deep shadow. The thin layers of dark glaze (paint mixed with varnish to
give a translucent glow) are placed next to more thickly opaque highlights. Using extremes of
light and shade in a painting to create a sense of drama is called chiaroscuro and is most usually
associated with Caravaggio and his followers. (Notes to Wright’s “An experiment on a bird in
the air pump”)
Moreover, the text goes on to explain that this is more frequently found in religious
paintings of the era, and provides two images illustrating uses of chiaroscuro in other
paintings to complement the reader’s understanding of its function.
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In other cases, the explanation deals with the concrete material basis of paint and
canvas. Again, description is complemented by interpretation, in which the work of art
in question is compared with other works or styles.
(22) The painting uses oil paint applied to paper. This gives it a smooth finish, with no surface
texture. The three pieces of paper were stuck together, and the joins are quite visible, especially
at the left. They were then mounted on canvas. This is an unconventional approach, but one
which is typical of Degas. The three sections make it resemble both a triptych, a three-panel
Christian altarpiece, and three-part Japanese woodblock prints.
(Notes to Dégas's
“Beach
sceneix”)
Other Notes concerning technique bring out idiosyncratic aspects of the painting in
question which might be interesting to a young audience, or which illustrate something
significant about the material, technique or style of the picture:
(23) Also visible are lots of pentimenti. Literally meaning ‘changes of minds’, these alterations
or corrections have become increasingly visible as the oil paints have become translucent with
the passage of time. For example the lynx in the bottom right hand corner appears to have an
extra leg and initially the young man in white had a larger head of hair. (Notes to Rubens’s “A
Roman triumph”)
V. HEURISTIC FOR WRITING EDUCATIONAL SINGLE IMAGE
ACCOUNTS
This section is intended as a guide for teachers or museum staff who need to create
educational material for use with young children. In the following section (VI), there is
a compilation of activity types that could be used to accompany the explanation of the
work of art.
Imagine yourself standing in front of the picture, explaining it to a group of children:
What overall impression does this picture make?
How might children use the five senses to respond to this picture?
What themes or aspects do you want to talk about in more detail?
How are these themes or details associated with?:
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
o shared human feelings (particularly those accessible to children)
o narratives (myths, legends, historical events)
o symbols (conventional or original)
Are the composition, techniques or materials used interesting?
Do you want to talk about any relevant aspects of the painter’s life?
Are there any mysteries or unanswered questions associated with the painting,
its subject or its artist?
When you are writing your SIA, remember that you need to use words to “point” to
particular aspects of the painting that you want to discuss. You can use expressions like
these to begin your description:
As we can see in the image...
As the picture shows...
Scenes/figures/landscapes like this...
You can then relate these descriptions to background and context by using phrases like:
These colours are associated with...
This image evokes...
The objects here symbolise...
This type of figure is typical of the...
You can go back from discussing context to pointing out instantiations in the painting
by using phrases like:
... is reflected/represented/echoed in the painting, where...
... can be seen in the composition of the picture, which...
Remember, you don’t need to give definitive explanations about everything. It might be
more interesting to open up discussion so that children can try to think of answers:
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Ruth Breeze
What do you think this person is thinking?
Why do you think the artist chose this colour/animal/background?
VI. SAMPLE ACTIVITIES
In this section, I provide an overview of different types of activities found in the Notes,
without reference to specific paintings, age groups or curricular goals, and going from
the more general response activities to the more complex or specific ones.
o
Learning to look at the picture more carefully: working together in pairs, one
pupil describes the picture and another draws, then they swap roles; using the
website to create crops of the picture and then working together in groups to
piece together the whole picture.
o
Responding to the people in the painting on a personal level: what do you think
the people are saying/thinking/feeling? If you could ask one of the people one
question, what would it be?
o
Multimodal response to the painting: ‘listen’ with your eyes, what can you hear?
What is the noisiest thing in the painting? If you could jump into the painting,
what would you see, hear, smell, touch? Who or what might live in there? What
music would go with this painting? If the picture were an advertisement, what
could you use it to advertise?
o
Responding to the subject of the painting by reproducing one part of it, or
drawing/painting something along similar lines, i.e. a full length painting of
oneself with a classmate, a tableau of a scene from mythology, a group portrait,
a skyscape, a “modern” still life, a representation of the same scene in a different
season.
o
Response to the subject, theme or mood of the painting by creating works in
different media, including visual arts, i.e. sculpture and film, but also music or
imaginative writing (stories, poems, descriptions).
o
Using part of the picture as a basis for a design: i.e. the floor in the painting is
made of patterned tiles, so design your own patterned tiles.
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
o Experimenting with materials used by artists in the past, e.g. egg tempera.
o Researching and responding to artistic styles: research the elements of Rococo
style and design something inspired by it.
o Exploring connections with other curricular areas: find out the French words for
the objects in the painting. Make a geographical enquiry into volcanoes. On a
modern map, trace Odysseus’s journey from Troy to the island of Ithaca.
Investigate how other religions and culture participate in similar parades and
celebrations today. Investigate dragon symbolism in other cultures.
VII. CONCLUSIONS
We have seen that these Notes share some of the basic features identified by Swales
(2016), most particularly the characteristic zigzagging between image descriptions and
context explanations. In this, it is interesting to think of the role of the writer as
emulating that of the museum guide, but also as reflecting a stable tendency among art
writers to oscillate between the visual and the verbal, or between showing and telling. In
Baxendall’s classic words (1979: 455), “one of the art historian’s specific faculties is to
find words to indicate the character of shapes, colours and organizations of them. But
these words are not so much descriptive as demonstrative”. Unlike other multimodal
genres, where the different semiotic modes may generate convergent, complementary or
divergent messages
(Bateman
2014) and language-image interactions have to be
decoded by users (Unsworth 2006), in this genre the written text is expressly dedicated
to revealing and explicating the image. Here, the writer uses words explicitly to create a
shared vision of the picture, and to guide the reader’s eyes into and around the world
within the frame.
Despite the underlying commonality that these Notes share with Swales’s SIAs, certain
new features are prominent here. We might speculate that some of these, at least, are
related to the fact that these texts are written for a specific double target: primary school
teachers (immediate readers) who are going to use the picture with their class (target
audience). As Fontal Merillas explains (2009: 84), one of the challenges in art education
is to facilitate the development of receptivity and artistic sensibility. Teachers therefore
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Ruth Breeze
need to deploy a range of strategies to encourage their pupils to share a sensation,
feeling or idea, and thus to help them feel their way into a work of art (Harris and
Zucker 2016). For this reason, aspects such as human interest (in the people represented
in the picture, or in the artist and his life) are often highlighted in these SIAs, and
narrative (again, telling the story depicted or incidents from the life of the painter) has
an important role in many of the texts. In some of the Notes, multimodal responses
based on hearing/smelling/feeling propose additional points of access to the painting,
stimulating the imagination and encouraging children to experience the picture more
fully (Harris and Zucker 2016). The Notes thus gently propose a series of pedagogical
strategies for the teachers to use with their pupils. The activities suggested at the end of
the Notes build on this by prompting multimodal responses of the kind recommended in
recent art pedagogy (Martikainen 2017). Finally, one discursive feature that many of the
notes have in common is their use of questions or speculative suggestions, which
overlaps with what Swales calls “contested interpretations”, but which is generally
expressed here through direct questions. Unlike the hedged speculations reported by
Swales, these do not provide a glimpse of academic controversy, but rather convey a
certain cognitive challenge which children may find stimulating.
Notes
i
“The fighting Temeraire”, by Joseph Turner.
ii
“Seaport with the embarkation of the Queen of Sheba”, by Claude Lorrain.
iii “An experiment on a bird in the air pump”, by Joseph Wright.
iv “A Roman triumph”, by Peter Paul Rubens.
v “The Graham children”, by William Hogarth.
vi “An autumn landscape with a view of Het Steen”, by Peter Paul Rubens.
vii “Penelope with the suitors”, by Pintoricchio (Bernardino di Betto).
viii “The umbrellas”, by Pierre-August Renoir.
ix “Beach scene”, by Edgar Dégas.
x “Still life with the drinking horn of the St Sebastian’s archers’ guild, lobster and glasses”, by Willem
Kalf.
xi “Two boys and a girl making music”, by Jan Miense Molenaer.
xii “The family of Darius before Alexander”, by Paolo Veronese.
xiii “The castle of Muiden in winter”, by Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten.
xiv “Bathers at Asniqres”, by Georges-Pierre Seurat,
All Notes are available on the webpage:
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Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in primary school
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Received: 10 April 2018
Accepted: 23 July 2018
Cite this article as:
Breeze, Ruth 2018. “Listening with your eyes: multimodal approaches to art appreciation in
primary school”. Language Value 10 (1), 45-67 Jaume I University ePress: Castelló, Spain.
http://www.e-revistes.uji.es/languagevalue.
ISSN 1989-7103
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