NEW YEAR

Motif: A Boy with a Sleigh How to depict the snow? How is a sleigh to be painted? How to encourage a child to think about the winter and the sleigh at the very beginning of a school year, after an extremely hot summer and during an exceptionally warm autumn? The sleigh was the theme of this year’s Competition of the Croatian Post for the New Year’s Postage Stamp. And all pupils of primary schools have been invited – through their art and class teachers - to participate in it. In terms of visual arts, a child will express himself or herself in a curious and original way only if the theme is appealing enough to him or her to start thinking about it visually. Fortunately, the children are really interested in the world that surrounds them, and good teachers can easily encourage them to start searching for visual answers to properly formulated questions. While solving this issue in terms of visual arts, for instance building of a sleigh, younger children will mostly tend to pay more attention to the presentation of the entire development around the sleigh than to the sleigh itself, whereas older pupils will research into the same item with a more analytical approach, perhaps even come up with new models of sleighs. However, both age groups should be cunningly encouraged to revive their authentic experience of the winter environment: their joy because of the first snow flakes and the magic of transformation of their well-known environment into an exciting white mystery, the experience of leaving their own footsteps in the snow, forming of round snow balls and snow ball fights, making of snowmen in order to mark the territory and leave some sign of the moment, their contented fatigue caused by relentless pulling of the sleigh uphill in order to dash downhill for a second, hitting some unexpected barrier, rolling on the ground after funny movements in the air, laughing with ruffled hair and wet through. Children have a special relation to the month of December because of their experience of holidays and presents. After the presents on St. Nicholas’ Day (6th of December) and the unique and to many a child favourite holiday – Christmas, when presents are traditionally given by Christ Child, the new holidays are ahead of us. They are connected with long expectation of New Year’s Day, counting the time in days, hours and minutes, with the idea of closing the "spent" period and the beginning of a new, maybe a better one. And with New Year’s Day there are again some presents coming to the kids and the older ones exchange presents among themselves. This raises quite a big problem: since Christmas many children, completely puzzled, have been asking questions, having doubts and discussing who brings presents to them (and when, actually). Is there such a guy as Santa Clause? And what about Father Christmas? What’s this old man’s real name? Learning foreign languages, picture books by authors from the entire world, television, cinema films, the Internet and social changes introduce names from various cultures into the kids’ heads: Santa Clause, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, the French Pere Noël, the Italian Babbo Natale, the Finnish Joulupukki, the Croatian Djed Mraz and Djed Božićnjak... However, there is one thing that remains unchanged in this whole mess: the children’s wishes to receive some very special gift, their intention to deserve it with their behaviour and their ( im)patient expectation that their wishes would be fulfilled. Finally, there is still a question how to depict the snow. On a piece of white paper the children’s snow, whether drawn or painted, is most often blue, whereas on black paper it can easily be white. But how to depict the snow that contains all the amazement caused by the child’s experience, softness, flexibility, changing of the condition into liquid and solid, stiffness and strength, light and all its colours contained in tiny ice crystals, shadows which are - look here! - not black but blue...? Leo, a pupil in the 2nd grade, has unrestrained imagination and a vivid visual thought, the visual art and technical means of exceptional possibilities – tempera – and an adequate paint brush, but also a teacher with expertise in the school subject Art. Most probably, she likes to play and research into something herself. It seems that in this task Leo and his teacher have been connected mostly around the idea of colour in the polar light of Lapland, as mentioned in the competition brochure. From this idea the teacher has come up with a new visual art issue for her pupils, the problem of the contrast warm – cold; she establishes the correlation between visual arts and society and nature, and then offers a sleigh as a motif. Leo has accepted that impetus. He has painted a boy, most probably himself, perfectly fit into the magic world of almost golden snow and snow flakes resembling the balls of orange and yellow-green light, additionally emphasised by the contrast of the blue skies. There is also a sleigh, with all its basic features, but almost lively and having a mind of its own, placed diagonally in the painting, in their most complete appearance, with a rectangular seat as seen from above and other characteristic parts unfolded around that rectangle. For all these reasons we are happy that Leo and this small painting of a colouristic play of the snow (in which there is no white "colour"!), in their new form of a postage stamp, will have an opportunity to communicate with other children worldwide, including the children from Lapland.