Famous art critic Ekaterina Baginskaya holds free master classes for children in Dubai.
Education in the field of culture should be started from early childhood, however, in the pursuit of spelling and mathematics, this most important layer of growing up a small personality often does not receive the necessary development. While at home we all have the opportunity to take our children to the Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Museum or the Mariinsky Theater, getting to know the beautiful in Dubai is a little more difficult to organize.
This is what Ekaterina Baginskaya, a mother of two children, and also a well-known art critic and educator in the field of art, thought about in Dubai. Many of our readers must have attended lectures on the history of adult art, which Catherine conducts quite often. We hasten to please you: Catherine’s new project is completely devoted to understanding children’s art.
We attended one of the classes that took place at the Elmarsa Gallery and talked with Ekaterina and her students.
Ekaterina: For several months I had a plan to talk with teenagers about the “serious” things while in the gallery. I wanted to show how current events in the country can be represented on canvas and paper. What means does the artist use to convey his attitude to what is happening, and most importantly, does he manage to achieve what he wants.
Just by going to the Elmarsa Gallery and looking at the first picture of Halim Karabibene, I already knew that I could "do" with it. This exhibition was ideally suited to my requirements, because during the lesson I was able to kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, to talk about the revolution (this is what the artist tells us), and secondly, to clearly demonstrate what surrealism is.
The conversation about the bloody events took place in the right direction for me: with an emphasis on representativeness. The children peered into the details, found confirmation of their thoughts and reasoned aloud. Neither horror nor irony laid down by the artist escaped them.
Polina, 11 years old: I really liked the lesson in the gallery. It was especially interesting to discuss the style, manner of writing and the meaning of all the paintings. It was also fun to portray the images in the paintings and try to guess which of the characters other guys guessed.
Ekaterina: The goals of such activities are to enable children to see what their parents usually go past. I want to arouse interest in children, a sense of curiosity, inadvertently developing a number of skills, communicative, for example, as well as critical and analytical thinking, and creative, too, and observation, of course. There are no wrong answers - every reasoned opinion has a place to be.
Diana, 14 years old: A very interesting master class. Catherine captivatingly tells and allows you to plunge deeply into the world of contemporary art. We had the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the history of the work and feel like characters in the paintings of the exhibition. We found ourselves inside the picture for some time and were able to tell the other participants what was happening on the canvases in motion.
Ekaterina: I have one more mega task: to show children (and also their parents) where modern art came from, i.e. to acquaint students with the art of the past, at least in reproductions. I often use them both in games, and for demonstration of this or that art direction. It is this task that sometimes dictates to me which exhibition to choose for a lesson.
You can learn more and sign up for free art classes for children on Ekaterina Baginskaya's Facebook page.
