Karen Comer

Collecting Stories

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Van Gogh – ‘arrive at the truthful’

July 7, 2017 by Karen Comer 4 Comments

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Last weekend – because there was no sport in the school holidays – hooray! – we all went to the Vincent van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria.

It was beautiful and crowded. Beautiful because the paintings were amazing. I loved seeing the brush strokes and the vivid colours.

I must admit, I didn’t enjoy hearing the commentary from all the other people looking at the same paintings. ‘Oh, that’s a nice one!’ seems a little banal when discussing van Gogh.

I didn’t take any photos of the paintings but I did take a photo of the following quote from van Gogh.

One must work long and hard to arrive at the truthful. What I want and set as my goal is damned difficult, and yet I don’t believe I’m aiming too high. I want to make drawings that move some people … Whether in figures or in landscapes, I would like to express not something sentimentally melancholic but deep sorrow. In short, I want to reach the point where people say of my work, that man feels deeply and that man feels subtly.

As a writer, it’s one of the hardest things to ‘arrive at the truthful’, to create fiction that tells the truth about how we feel about things and what matters. It’s an odd dichotomy that art can reflect ourselves better than reality sometimes.

We have a picture book called Camille and the sunflowers written by Laurence Anholt. The story is told from Camille’s point of view. He’s a young boy, who with his father, a postman, befriends Vincent. Vincent paints portraits of Camille’s family and a wonderful painting of sunflowers, based on a bunch which Camille gave him.

There’s a brief animation and a reading of this book here, if you have kids who are interested.

There’s also a book by Laurence Anholt called Anholt’s artists activity book about a few artists, with ideas for kids to create their own artwork based on these artists’ techniques. The van Gogh one is about painting a portrait.

The van Gogh exhibition closes tomorrow – hurry!

Filed Under: Children's Fiction, Writing Tagged With: art, picture books, van Gogh, writing

Giveaway – BIG kids art magazine

March 11, 2016 by Karen Comer 12 Comments

Issue_9-Collections-3

I have a giveaway – a children’s art magazine – to thank you for following my blog! BIG kids magazine is an original and creative magazine for kids. It values the art of kids and professional artists equally. It inspires kids to create, consider, wonder, imagine, read, write, play, dream …

BIG stands for bravery, imagination and generosity, and each issue asks different artists of different ages how they define these terms.

Untitled

I have to admit I am extremely biased – I have been the copy editor for BIG ever since it launched in 2010. When the first pages fly in to me from Jo Pollitt in Perth and Lilly Blue in Sydney, I love seeing the different styles of art from adults and kids, the free-flowing words from Jo, the wide-ranging ideas from all parts of the world and Lilly’s evocative, meaningful art. Editing this magazine is a treat for the senses, even through my computer screen.

Storybook

Issue 9’s theme is Collections. My favourite sections in this issue are Jo and Lilly’s collection of Big ideas, the storybook photographs by Eva Fernandez and the botanical portraits by fifteen year-old artist Zali Bartholomew. Looking at these pages makes me want to go on a nature walk, have a tea party and start collecting!

Zali

The tenth issue, a keepsake edition, will be available in December. You can follow BIG kids art magazine here.

I have three copies of issue 9 to give away. If you would like to win a copy of:

‘an art gallery you can hold in your hands, a printed publication of multidisciplinary creative portals to curiosity and imagination’

please leave a comment below by midnight, Sunday 13 March. I will draw three winners at random and then post the editions out. Good luck!

Filed Under: Art Tagged With: art, Big kids magazine, writing

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