Starry Night

This post is not about actual stars, I should say that right now (You can't really see the stars here most of the time, too much pollution of the light and normal fossil fuel varieties. And especially right now during the rainy season, this is doubly impossible). It is, in fact, about my class this morning, in which I attempted to explain a few centuries of Western art to my class.

I exaggerate a little. I had actually done most of the explaining the class before, along with a crash course in art criticism (What do you see in this painting? How does it make you feel?). It's impossible to get too technical, because honestly their English skills, for the most part, aren't up to it. Not their fault, really, more the fault of an overzealous administration whose expectations are waaaaay too high. And they seem to know that they're too high? And be okay with it anyway? But at the very least I tried to teach them some vocabulary with which to talk about art, and explain certain artistic periods in as simple language as possible. I utterly failed when it came to postmodernism, but you know, I don't think the world will implode because of it. I doubt any of my students will soon be facing a British monster who does not understand Vietnamese and will only spare their lives if they can define postmodernism. I actually have no idea what their background in art is like, because when I ask about it they just give me blank stares. It seems like some students are interested in it, and so already knew some stuff, and some aren't interested at all.

For today's class I set up a kind of "museum" in that I printed out a bunch of pictures of famous and semi-famous paintings that I thought might interest them, ranging all the way from the Mona Lisa to a self portrait by Frida Kahlo (They thought it was a painting of a man. Frida might actually be happy about that?). Because most places here print in black and white, I also later on projected the images of the paintings from a computer onto the wall so that they could see the painting in color. The students had to pick one and play art critic with it, talking about what was in the painting, why they chose it, how it made them feel, what they think it meant or was trying to do. Questions like that. Nothing too crazy. Some of my students came up with awesome stuff, and because I'm not really a student of art history (not European art, at least) there was no voice in the back of my head yelling "No! They've got it all wrong! Correct them! That's not what this painting is about at all!" After all, this was an exercise in using language related to art, not an actual art history lesson. When talking about Picasso's The Old Guitarist, one student said something along the lines of "When I see him, I feel very sad and lonely. I think he is poor and alone and has no friends, and the only thing he can use to express his soul is his guitar". Another student suggested that maybe American Gothic was about a couple who had lots of problems that they were powerless to solve and so they worried a lot (I have no idea what that painting is actually supposed to be about, I'll admit it). It's clear that they have many great ideas, they're just held back by language and by how shy they can be.

That having been said, my students are not as as cripplingly shy as I thought they would be. I can get them to speak. Well, I can get some of them to speak. And they start getting into something, the shy ones usually forget to be shy. But it is definitely something that gets in the way.

A side note, one of my students picked Starry Night, talking about the play of light and dark in the painting. Her reason for picking the painting was that it reminded her of a song she liked, called "Vincent". My brain exploded! "That song is about the Vincent who painted this painting!" I exclaimed perhaps a little too loudly. She just nodded politely at me. Later, after class, I asked her about it and she said that the song (it's by Don Mclean) isn't really known in Vietnam, but that she had heard it in a movie whose name I wrote down and have since misplaced. I was totally floored that she knew this song, especially since I had actually been considering basing a lesson around it for next week. It's slow enough that I think they can catch all the words, and we could have a discussion about the lives of artists, etc., but I've since nixed the idea because it isn't that much fun to sing along to. The students here love singing along to songs, and doing so would help with their pronunciation. So I'll just have to find something else! Hopefully something that has to do with art. Suggestions are welcome.