EDUCATOR GUIDE: Eric Carle: Animals and Friends

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WELCOME Dear Educator, Thank you for your interest in Eric Carle: Animals and Friends at the Montclair Art Museum. Whether you have booked a docent-led tour, a gallery/studio program, or a self-guided visit, this resource guide is designed to make your experience more enriching and meaningful. Please use it with your students in the classroom before and after your museum visit. It provides questions to guide close looking, topics for discussions, and activities which will help engage the key themes and concepts of the exhibition. Art and writing projects have been suggested so that students can explore ideas from the exhibition in ways that relate directly to their lives and experiences. Please feel free to adapt and build on these materials and to use this packet in any way that you wish. School programs at MAM are aligned with the Common Core Standards as well as the goals laid out by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. They promote literacy and evidential reasoning, content knowledge and critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. MAM invites students and teachers to: · look closely, find clues, and solve puzzles · become engaged with an artwork, in a debate · discover connections between facts and feelings, art and life · be inspired to create their own stories and artworks · feel empowered to find their own place at MAM We look forward to welcoming you and your students to the Montclair Art Museum! Sincerely, Petra Pankow, Director of Education 973 259 5157 or ppankow@montclairartmuseum.org

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ERIC CARLE: ANIMALS AND FRIENDS Featuring work by the acclaimed children’s book author and illustrator Eric Carle (b. 1929), Eric Carle: Animals and Friends highlights the artist’s meticulous preparatory process and key childhood themes of animals and friendship. It includes more than 60 original collages, studies, and book dummies/mock ups. Especially noteworthy are Carle’s colorful, hand-painted tissue paper collages, which form the basis of his illustrations. In addition, there will be preliminary works including pencil studies that underscore Carle’s meticulous care for his subject. The works in this exhibition address the subjects of two recent publications by Carle: his love of color and use of imagination expressed in The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse (2011) and the celebration of childhood from Friends (2013). Carle’s love of nature is legendary. To recognize this passion, the exhibition includes selected work from The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse, as well as other publications exploring his interest in animals. The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse was inspired by the bright, unconventional animal paintings of the German artist Franz Marc (1880-1916). Marc’s Blue Horse I (1911) and other works were admired by the young Carle who spent his boyhood in Germany when the Nazi regime prohibited the creation or display of modern art. His art teacher secretly showed the teenager examples of the forbidden art. Carle recently observed, “My green lion, polka-dotted donkey and other animals painted in the ‘wrong’ colors were really born that day seventy years ago.” Eric Carle's picture book, Friends, published in November 2013, is a celebration of friendship and childhood expressed in colorful tissue paper collage. It recounts the poetic story of an imaginary journey of the child at play. Inspired by Carle's memories of early friendships, as well as friendships in his adult life, the book celebrates the importance of close relationships and the lasting bonds that remain through every stage in life. Since his best-known work, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, was published in 1969, Carle has illustrated more than 70 books, most of which he also wrote. The characteristic themes of friendship and nature will be further explored in additional works from Carle’s vast repertoire, including Do You Want to Be My Friend? (1971), The Rooster Who Set Out to See the World (1972), Do Bears Have Mothers Too? (1973), Animals Animals (1989), and Where Are You Going? To See My Friend (2001). Eric Carle: Animals and Friends was organized in conjunction with The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, Massachusetts.

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TAKE A LOOK Take a close look at the picture on the previous page:

• What is the first thing you notice? • What else can you find? • What are the two figures doing? • What does their body language tell you? • What colors do you see? • What patterns do you notice? • List all the shapes you can find. • Can you think of a good title for this picture?

EXPLORE The famous children’s book author and illustrator Eric Carle used this image as the title page of his book Friends (2103). He got the idea from an old photo of himself at age 3 and his little friend in a tight embrace. You can see the picture on the right:

• Compare and contrast the two images. In what way are they similar? What differences can you find?

DISCUSS A hug is a great way to depict friendship and a fitting title image for a book about two friends. Other pictures in Carle’s book show the two children running, playing, and dancing together.

• What do you like to do best with your friends? • If you had to come up with one thing that best describes what

friendship means to you, what would it be and how do you show it?

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YOUR TURN Eric Carle was born in Syracuse, New York in 1929 to parents who had emigrated from Germany a few years earlier. When he was six years old, his family moved back to Stuttgart, Germany, and he had to leave his friend from the photo behind in the USA – on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. You can follow his journey on the map below:

• Do you have a friend who lives in a different place (either another state or another country)? On a world map in your classroom, find where he or she lives and draw an imaginary connecting line to your own home, asking your teacher for help, if needed.

Even though Eric Carle eventually moved back to the United States in 1952 and spent most of his adult life in this country, he only recently found the friend from the photo again - after 80 years!

• If this seems like too long of a wait, write a postcard to your faraway friend right now and ask your teacher or parent to mail it for you. What will you tell your friend? Add an illustration (a picture), too!

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TAKE A LOOK Take a minute to look closely at the picture on the previous page:

• Describe, in as much detail as possible, what you see. • What do you notice about the figure in the picture – make sure to look

at clothing, body language, facial expression, and surrounding details. Come up with a story of who this person is and what he/she is doing.

• Take a closer look at the painting the artist made and describe it. What about it surprises you – why?

EXPLORE

This image is taken from a children’s book by Eric Carle, entitled The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse (2013). Carle was inspired by Franz Marc, a German expressionist painter who lived over 100 years ago. Like many modern artists, Marc wanted to change the rules of how art was made. He wanted to show not what the world really looked like but how he felt about it. He used his art to express his feelings. So he painted blue horses, purple foxes, and yellow cows. In his book, Eric Carle even adds a polka-dotted donkey to the list of unusually colored animals!                          

• Imagine the artist in the picture started to speak to you. What might he say?

• What question would you ask in return?  • What do you think Eric Carle is trying to tell us about art?  • What message do you take away?  

DISCUSS Eric Carle was born in Syracuse, NY, but moved to Germany when he was 6, in 1935. During that time, there was very little freedom in that country and the totalitarian Nazi Party tried to control everything - even art. Eric Carle’s school, too, was very strict and students were not allowed to express themselves creatively. However, Carle’s art teacher, Fridolin Krauss, disagreed. One day, he invited young Eric to his house and showed him reproductions of works by modern artists like Franz Marc, Henri Matisse,

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and Pablo Picasso - a risky business since these pictures were banned. Carle remembered that the examples of “so-called ‘degenerate art’… my teacher showed me were unlike anything I had been exposed to before. And really this experience changed my life, though I didn't know it at the time.”

• What do you think Carle meant by that? In what way might looking at pictures change someone’s life?

• What does it mean to be “creative”? • Why is creativity important?

YOUR TURN Unleash your own creativity by decorating the horse template on the following page. What color(s) will your horse be? What patterns and texture might it have? What materials will you use? Remember, that in art, anything goes.

“There isn’t any wrong color and. . .you don’t have to stay within the lines. In art, you’re supposed to be free!” - Eric Carle

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TAKE A LOOK Take a long and careful look at the image on the previous page.

• What is going on in this picture? (Back up your observations with evidence: what do you see that makes you draw certain conclusions?)

• What is the relationship between the two giraffes? How can you tell? • Can you come up with a good title for the picture? Please explain.

EXPLORE

• What different patterns do you notice? What do they represent? • Looking at different textures in the image, what would different areas

of the picture feel like to the touch? Take another look at the picture and think about how the artist, Eric Carle, might have created it:

• What materials did he use? • What do you think was his process? • Are different areas created in different ways? Please explain.

DISCUSS In the book Do Bears Have Mothers, Too?, from which this image is taken, you can look at Eric Carle’s illustrations alongside poems written by Aileen Fisher. Here is the poem Baby Giraffe, which accompanies the picture: Baby Giraffe When you get big, my beautiful calf, you’ll be more tall than tall-and-a-half. No one’s as tall as a grown giraffe. And nobody blends so perfectly With a sunlit grove…so it’s hard to see What spots are giraffe and what are tree. But now you’re small, and you hardly know My pet, where your legs and your neck should go. I’ll give you a nudge and help you – so! Up on your stilts, your neck in the sky! You have to stand tall with your head held high; Your dinner is waiting up here, that’s why.

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• Read the second stanza of the poem again: Why do giraffes have

spots? • Can you think of other animals whose skin or fur serves as camouflage

in their natural habitat? • According to Fisher’s poem, why is it important for the baby giraffe to

learn “to stand tall with [its] head held high”? Please explain.

YOUR TURN Eric Carle did a great job at recreating the intricate patterning on the giraffes’ fur and used blue, green, and lime-colored dots to render the lush texture of their pasture. Create your own pattern, using Carle’s process: You will need:

• a sheet of white paper, white tissue paper • watercolors or tempera paint • scissors, glue

First, brush or splatter a few sheets of white tissue paper with paint. Let them dry. Use the animal patterns below for inspiration. Let the papers dry. Then cut out the shapes you want to use in your pattern and arrange them on a sheet of white paper to form an animal. When done, use glue to affix the patterned shapes to the white paper.

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TAKE A LOOK Describe the scene in the picture on the previous page.

• Where do you think it takes place? • What clues does the artist give us? • What animals do you notice? • Imagine the picture coming to life – what movements would you be

able to detect? • What sounds might you hear?

EXPLORE For Eric Carle’s book “Slowly, Slowly, Slowly,” said the Sloth, Eric Carle teamed up with acclaimed zoologist Jane Goodall to introduce children to the gentle creatures named sloths, which live in the jungles of South America.

• How can you tell that Eric Carle’s picture shows the rain forest? • What does the picture teach us about the lifestyle of the sloth?

DISCUSS In Eric Carle’s story, many animals come up to the sloth and ask him, in turn, why he is so slow, quiet, boring, and lazy, to which the sloth replies: It is true that I am slow, quiet, and boring. I am lackadaisical, I dawdle and I dillydally, I am also unflappable, languid, stoic, impassive, sluggish, lethargic, placid, calm, mellow, laid-back and, well, slothful! I am relaxed and tranquil and I like to live in peace. But I am not lazy.1

• Think of an animal that is exactly the opposite of the sloth: an animal that’s fast and active and likes to move swiftly from place to place.

• Discuss with your class why you think your animal is the most unlike the sloth, then take a vote for the most “unslothful” animal.

• Find as many adjectives as possible to describe this hyper-active animal and make a list of words on the board in your classroom.

1 Eric Carle, “Slowly, Slowly, Slowly,” said the Sloth, New York: Philomel, 2002.

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YOUR TURN In Jane Goodall’s foreword to the book, the acclaimed zoologist describes her lifelong interest in and love for sloths and their slow, gentle, peaceful lifestyle. She writes that one of the goals of the book is to make readers aware of how important it is to save and preserve the sloth’s habitat in the Amazon rainforest. She writes: “Today they fear destruction of their habitat as forests are cut down for timber or to create grazing land for cattle.”2

• Can you think of other endangered animals? • What can we do to protect them? • Research some organizations that work to protect endangered

species and make a list of things we can do to help. The following websites are a good start:

http://www.janegoodall.org/ http://www.wcs.org/ https://www.worldwildlife.org/ http://www.endangered.org/10-easy-things-you-can-do-to-save-endangered-species/

2 Ibid.

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TAKE A LOOK Take a close look at the picture on the previous page.

• What do you think is happening? • Who are the characters in the picture? • Where are they? • What are they doing?

EXPLORE Divide your class into two groups.

• The first group (individually or in pairs) will write a paragraph or two of what happened (two minutes, an hour) before the scene in the picture. This will be the beginning of the story.

• The second group (individually or in pairs) will write a story about what is going to happen next (in a minute, an hour, a day). This will be the end of the tale.

• Since Eric Carle created this picture as an illustration of a fairy tale, consider incorporating typical fairy tale components into your story, such as phrases like “once upon a time” and “happily ever after,” a good character and an evil character, magical elements, and a victory of good over evil.

DISCUSS The image is taken from Seven Stories by Hans Christian Andersen: Illustrated and Retold by Eric Carle. While Eric Carle conceived the text of many of his well-known books, like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Friends, and The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse, he started his career not as a children’s book author but a graphic artist working in advertising. With picture books, we often pay more attention to the illustrations than to the text and tend to forget to think about how word and image work together.

• Looking at some classic fairy tale illustrations on the next page, discuss why you think the artists chose this particular scene to illustrate?

• How does the illustration add to the story’s text as you know it?

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YOUR TURN

• What is your favorite fairy tale? Think of a key scene that summarizes or perfectly describes the story (such as the princess kissing the frog in the Frog Prince, Cinderella losing her shoe, or Rapunzel’s long braid hanging out of her tower jail).

• Discuss why the scene you picked is important and how it relates to the rest of the story.

• Create an illustration for that scene. With sharpie, pencils, or oil pastel, outline your characters and setting, then color in with tempera and watercolor.

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GLOSSARY

Atlantic Ocean The sea stretching from the North Pole to Antarctica, which separates Europe and Africa to the East from North and South America to the West.

Camouflage Color or patterning that helps hide an animal or object by blending in with its surrounding, such as green feathers on a bird living in the woods, spots on animals living in the jungle, where light and shadow prevail, etc.

Continent Major continuous landmasses on the globe, often separated from each other by oceans (Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia, and Antarctica).

Degenerate Art From 1933 to 1945, the totalitarian Nazi government in Germany tried to control every aspect of life, including art. They wanted art to mirror the strict, disciplined, and militaristic ideals of the state. Artists who were interested in innovation and experimentation were forbidden to practice and even had their artwork destroyed. Luckily, after World War II, everyone was allowed to practice whatever art they liked best again.

Expressionist An art movement in the early 1900s started by artists who wanted to use their works not to mimic the real world but to show how they felt inside by using vivid, exaggerated colors, shapes, and lines that conveyed their emotions.

Franz Marc (1880-1916) A German Expressionist artist and a founding member of Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group of modern painters who were less interested in creating images that depicted real life but used bright colors, abstract shapes, and vivid brushstrokes to communicate feelings and moods. Marc was well-known for his paintings of animals in unusual colors, which he used as symbols for emotions, such as joy, sadness, and fear. Habitat The natural environment that is home to an animal or group of animals.

Henri Matisse One of the greatest modern artists known for his use of flat planes of vivid color, intricate patterns, and joyous compositions, Matisse lived in France from 1869-1954 and influenced many artists from the 20th century till today, all over the world.

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Illustration An image alongside a text, which explains, clarifies, or decorates the written word. Jane Goodall A famous English zoologist and the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees as well as activist for the preservation and protection of animals worldwide.

Modern In art, architecture, music, and literature, a style that breaks with tradition and experiments with new ways of expression, often placing more value on a personal perspective rather than a truth or reality shared by all. Pablo Picasso One of the most versatile and innovative artists of the 20th century. Picasso lived from 1881 to 1973 first in Spain, where he was from, and then in France. He was one of the founders of cubism, a style of painting where things, places, or people are broken up into shapes and re-painted in an abstract form. Picasso also helped invent collage as well as sculptures constructed out of different everyday materials.

Pattern A design made up of repeating shapes, often used on fabric, wallpaper, or dishware. Animal skins often have patterns, too: think of tigers, zebras, and snakes. Process The steps an artist takes to get from an idea to a finished artwork. Stanza A number of lines bundled together that share a rhythm and sometimes rhyming pattern that is repeated throughout a poem. Texture The surface quality of an object (rough, jagged, soft, smooth, furry, etc.) We can distinguish between real texture, the actual texture of an object and implied texture, like a drawing of a tree trunk, which may look rough but in fact it is just a smooth piece of paper. Artists may create real texture in art to make it visually interesting or to evoke a feeling. Totalitarian A form of government that tries to completely control every aspect of public and private life. Zoologist A scientist studying animals.

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IMAGE CREDITS: Cover Eric Carle (b. 1929) Final illustration for “Baby Monkey,” 1972 Do Bears Have Mothers Too? [Crowell, 1973] Acrylic, crayon, and tissue paper collage on illustration board © 1973 by Eric Carle. Collection of Eric and Barbara Carle. Courtesy of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art Page 2 Eric Carle (b. 1929) Front cover illustration, 2012 Friends [Philomel, 2013] Acrylic and tissue paper collage on illustration board © 2013 by Eric Carle. Collection of Eric and Barbara Carle. Courtesy of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art Page 5 Eric Carle (b. 1929) Final illustration for “I am a good artist,” 2010 The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse [Philomel, 2011] Acrylic and tissue paper collage on illustration board © 2011 by Eric Carle. Collection of Eric and Barbara Carle. Courtesy of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art Page 6 Eric Carle (b. 1929) Final illustration for “a polka-dotted donkey,” 2010 The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse [Philomel, 2011] Acrylic and tissue paper collage on illustration board © 2011 by Eric Carle. Collection of Eric and Barbara Carle. Courtesy of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art Page 9 Eric Carle (b. 1929) Final illustration for “Baby Giraffe,” ca. 1973 Do Bears Have Mothers Too? [Crowell, 1973] Acrylic and tissue paper collage on illustration board © 1973 by Eric Carle. Collection of Eric and Barbara Carle. Courtesy of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art Page 11 Eric Carle (b. 1929) Final illustration for “Slowly, slowly, slowly, a sloth crawled...,” July 25, 2001 “Slowly, Slowly, Slowly,” said the Sloth [Philomel, 2002] Acrylic and tissue paper collage on illustration board. © 2001 by Eric Carle. Collection of Eric and Barbara Carle. Courtesy of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art Page 15 Eric Carle (b. 1929) Final illustration for “‘Gladly,’ answered Little Klaus,” 1977 Seven Stories by Hans Christian Andersen [Franklin Watts, 1978] Acrylic, watercolor, crayon, and tissue paper collage on illustration board. © 2001 by Eric Carle. Collection of Eric and Barbara Carle. Courtesy of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art