Saturday, May 5, 2007

What does she see?

Maybe my challenge should be THINKING CREATIVELY. Here's something visual for anyone who likes a challenge. Enlarge Winslow Homer's painting "Country School" by clicking on it. Study it carefully, and then make up a story about what the teacher sees out that side window (on our left). She is looking in that direction. Does she hear something? What's going on out there? Think about your story before clicking HERE for one suggestion about what's outside that window.

2 comments:

Ginnie said...

The shade on that window is drawn, and the children are unaware of anything of interest in that direction. I believe the teacher has heard the tree limbs scritch scratching against the window, and has seen the shadow of her future self. Will she grow old in this classroom, teaching future generations, or will she find her own true love, and bear children of her own? Where have her childhood dreams gone, the days when she waded barefoot into the creek down in the hollow? The nights when she watched shadows cross the moon?

Now she watches shadows on a drawn shade. Shadows of things that might have been, shadows of things yet to come. She listens. Is that a voice calling her to her heart's desire? Scritch scratch, scritch scratch. The children wait. It is time to teach the next lesson.

Bonnie Jacobs said...

I posted this exercise well over a year ago, Ginnie, and you are apparently the first to notice the thin material on the window. Because I can see through the gauzy stuff on the window behind her, I imagined she could have seen something like this:
http://answercreatively.blogspot.com/2007/05/maybe-this.html

Look again at the enlarged picture, evertbody, and imagine she is still daydreaming, as Ginnie so wonderfully described:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0agwm6I7YZE/Rj8ZuvVLpBI/AAAAAAAABDE/0fdVde0snPU/s1600-h/country-school-winslow-homer.jpg

I like those shadows on the shade, Ginnie!