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<\/a>Jon Klassen joins a class of third grade art critics.<\/p><\/div>
\nTake a close look at this painting. Do you see a king and his leonine pet, a\u00a0costumed\u00a0lad’s accidental run-in with a lion, or someone trying to steal a crown? If you could turn the page and create the next scene without any context, what would you consider? I don’t know if you can tell, but that lion seems like he’s trying to\u00a0say\u00a0an awful lot with his eyes. And where one viewer might just see a royal portrait, another might see an image pulsing with the threat of a coup or even murder in the offing\u2014which\u00a0were some of the theories debated by one group of third graders at a recent event with Jon Klassen at the Blanton Museum of Art.
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\nDesigned to use the work of extraordinary illustrators as a jumping-off point for art exploration, the Art of the Book series we’ve been running with the Blanton Museum of Art brings students in for illustrator presentations followed by activities in the galleries\u00a0tying into themes drawn from the illustrators’ work. I\u2019ve previously shared posts about the fun we\u2019ve had with\u00a0Javaka Steptoe<\/a>, Armand Baltazar<\/a>, and M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin<\/a>, and this month, 300 (mostly) third graders had the good fortune to join Jon Klassen for our fourth <\/a>installment. Filled with visual clues\u00a0that don\u2019t always match the words on the page and characters whose expressions do much of the dramatic heavy lifting,\u00a0Jon’s books embrace kids\u2019 innate perceptiveness (and\u00a0delight at being in on a secret)\u2014which of course make them the perfect launching pad for an exercise in\u00a0artistic\u00a0interpretation.
\nAfter we had discussed\u00a0the\u00a0painting above, the kids in our group were divided in half, given the prompt, \u201cAnd his stomach rumbled,\u201d and told to construct freeze frame scenes of what exactly might transpire next. As the kids conferred, one of the adults in the group predicted the two scenes would follow the same path. And perhaps if we were watching two groups of adults, that would be true. To be fair, there were some strong similarities at first glance, notably a focus on raw carnage in both (the lion’s eyes convinced them all of a\u00a0threat). But as we probed the kids\u2019 scenes, they revealed very different intentions. In one, the lion had killed the king, supported by revolutionaries as the queen looked on in shock, while in the other, we saw that many brave souls had died\u00a0defending the lion and her baby from the violence of a mad king. But really, since these were silent scenes, the fun was in the\u00a0interpretation from the audience. Was that a king wielding a spear or a witch waving a wand? Were the victims really dead or\u00a0was it\u00a0 an elaborate ruse? Dead people usually don\u2019t laugh…
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