Art is Fun, by Sasha Watson

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I love art. I love spending long days in museums, I love coming across odd sculptures in parks and on street corners, and I love looking at the funny, lovely paintings, photographs, and objects that my friends make.

Now, I'm not much of a visual artist myself, so it was especially enjoyable for me to turn my main character, Vidalia, into an artist. I decided to give her two big art projects, and to have each of these come out of a completely different school of thought about art-making.

Vidalia's Rabbit Houses are the first project, and they come out of what I call the "Art is fun!" school. Most of the artists I know are people who love to play with stuff. They'll see a piece of trash and turn it into something amazing, or they'll dream up some crazy idea and then make it real.

Like this, for instance:

This artist, Mike Ross, must have thought to himself, "Wouldn't it be cool if a couple of big rigs danced with each other? And, lo, with a lot of welding and the help of a crane, the Big Rig Jig was born.

On a smaller scale, Vidalia dreams up a series of houses. She builds them out of Styrofoam and cardboard, and decorates them down to the last detail. Inside the houses, clothed rabbits occupy the rooms, living their rabbit lives.

 

One of the inspirations for the Rabbit Houses were Sloane Tanen's chicks:

The art project that Vidalia completes during the course of the book is a copy of a Renaissance painting. This comes out of her French art class, which represents a totally different school of art training, the "Classical Art" approach.

When I was a senior in high school, I visited a friend, who was studying painting in the classical way in Florence. He spent a lot of time painting live models and studying and copying the Old Masters. This classical education is what Vidalia gets in her art class in Paris.

My friend, Brandon Soloff, who was studying in Florence, is a full-time artist today, painting beautiful portraits in the classic style. View Brandon's gallery here.

There are so many ways of making art and so many spirits in which to make it. I had a lot of fun living just a couple of them with Vidalia.

Sasha Watson, Vidalia in Paris, Young Readers, Viking Children's Books, Penguin Books