Parshat Vayetze - Kandinsky Sheep
I could have made my life very easy this week. I could have (maybe should have) made Jacob's ladder toys with the kids. There is a great tutorial found here. But, why do something simple when you can do something complicated (insert eye roll here)...
During my Parsha reading, I kept getting drawn into the story of Jacob's speckled, spotted, and streaked goats and sheep. What kind of art teacher (or even a pretend art teacher like me) could pass up the mention of dots and stripes?!?!?
The main problem was that I have NEVER understood this crazy story. I have since read it over many times with commentaries and I still don't really get it. I know that it basically goes something like this:
Jacob wants to leave Laban's house and the "payment" he asks for is in animals (first thing I needed to figure out was the basic terminology - herd/flock צאן/עדר is made up of sheep כבשים and goats עיזים) I admit that I was even kind of a little fuzzy on the differences between goats and sheep which may have required a bit of googling on my part.
Next, sheep are usually white but a minority can be black, brown or spotted. Likewise, goats are usually brown/black but a minority are speckled, spotted, or striped. So, basically Jacob asked for the "irregulars" which Laban assumed would be the minority so readily agreed.
I am not even going to try to understand what happened next - either through some weird miracle, or magic, or brilliant genetic selection, Jacob ends up with lots of goats and sheep, instead of the few that Laban had assumed would when making their deal.
Since the sheep in question are described as "נקד וטלוא," I decided that our art would be based on נקודות or dots. I learned quickly that this was a dangerous avenue to pursue since so much great art is based on DOTS! Seurat, Roy Lichtenstein, Aborigines...
But, most popular among art teachers seems to be projects based on the artwork of Wassily Kandinsky:
And there are plenty of great tutorials out there of how to do Kandinsky-like art with kids of all ages, either with oil pastels, paints, colored, paper or felt. But, when I came across artists who crossed sheep and Kandinsky, I decided to go in that direction...
I cut out the shape of a sheep, thinking that I would make a few of them with the kids and we would display them on the schoolyard as an artistic herd. I made an example for my backyard which my own kids thought looked pretty weird:
In the end, we only made one sheep (who they named "Tzivoni" and I was too worried that it would get destroyed outside so we just used it for our weekly bulletin board.
I am still not 100% sure how I feel about this week's project. If I had to do it over again, I may have taken a different route. Maybe something with black and white patterns. These cats are saved on my "sheep" pinterest board for next year...
Shabbat Shalom!