Digital creatives: Monet, sunrise to sunset
French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Levels 4-8
NGV Digital Creatives supports the integration of STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) with the visual arts and provides an authentic context for developing problem solving, critical and creative thinking skills. A new coding activity is developed alongside each major exhibition. Schools are invited to visit the NGV for an exhibition viewing, take part in a virtual excursion or follow the activity in the classroom using this resource.
The activity uses Scratch – a program which teaches the foundations of coding. Students apply mathematical and computational thinking to get creative with coding and make twenty-first century art.
Learning Objectives
- experiment with key programming concepts including sequencing, repetition, broadcast and receive blocks and if/else statements
- build a simple animation using blocks of code with Scratch
- use code to create an animated sequence
Supported by Telstra
Monet, Sunrise to Sunset
The French Impressionists painted outside in the open air, quickly capturing scenes of everyday life and the ever-changing effects of light. Artist Claude Monet often painted multiple canvases depicting the same scene at different times of day to capture the changing atmospheric conditions. From 1890-1891, he created over twenty-five paintings of the wheat stacks near his home in Giverny in Northern France. He painted them in different seasons and weather conditions. Fifteen of the Haystacks series were shown in Paris in 1891 to critical acclaim; art critic Gustave Geffroy described Monet’s work as ‘summing up the poetry of the universe within a circumscribed (limited) space.’1
Scratch
This NGV Digital Creatives program is informed by the French Impressionists’ interest in and experimentation with light and colour. Use code and digital drawing tools to animate the transition from sunrise to sunset over a Claude Monet inspired landscape.
Fun fact: Did you know the sun only truly rises in the east on one day of the year and it only appears that way if you are facing north? Monet painted Grainstack (snow effect), 1891, while he was facing south-west, so to him the sun was rising on the left.
Workshop instructions
Part 1: Look inside
Part 2: Night time
Reference
- Katie Hanson, Julia Welch, Ted Gott & Miranda Wallace et al., French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2021., p.213.