Teens/adults - Lesson 5: You, the art critic

Art at Home includes a children’s lesson using a painting by Kent Christensen, Secrets of the Great Salt Lake. We challenged the children to look closely and think like an art critic.

Can you do the same?

In this lesson, we will look at the painting, speak to the artist, look at clues together, learn why/when/how it was made, talk about social issues, and then we’ll invite you to explain your own interpretation of the work. Finally, we challenge you to write a brief piece art criticism and share it with us, and we’ll post it on the website, below.

The painting is titled, Secrets of the Great Salt Lake. It is by Kent Christensen. We have several resources that can help you discover more about it:

• The artist created a short video just for kids, asking five easy questions about the painting. It’s not a bad introduction to get your critical juices flowing.

• The artist’s website will show you this and other art works by Kent Christensen.

• A video interview on PBS talks with the artist about the making of the painting and the way he works.

• Kent Christensen sat down for a one-hour podcast interview with us, exclusively about Secrets of the Great Salt Lake.

Study all of the above, but nothing is more important than looking closely at the painting itself. Kent has said this project has taken 500 hours of work, and it’s all based on actual people, places, things, and events. (Well, he’s taken some liberties, unless you have a photograph of Brigham riding dinosaurs that historians don’t know about.) He has packed information all throughout the painting. The more things you can identify, the more you’ll be able to make some decisions on interpretation.

Be aware of your emotional reaction to the work, too. Humor, satire, exaggeration, social commentary: all of those things appear in the painting and affect your interpretation.

Here are a few questions that might be interesting for you to try to answer as roadsigns to interpretation:

Kent is carrying on a conversation with other artists in this painting, whose work he is borrowing or referencing: Minerva Teichert (American, 1888-1976), Robert Smithson (American, 1938-1973), and Hieronymus Bosch (Dutch, c. 1450-1516). What do you make of those connections?

You wouldn’t immediately think that a painting of such wacky things could be autobiographical, but Kent’s ancestors are directly tied to these events and this place. How do you see nostalgia and autobiography in this work?

An element of satire is social commentary. In Secrets of the Great Salt Lake, what is going on in the right panel, from an ecological viewpoint—one can read the painting from left to right. How is the right panel’s tone different than the sunny, colorful feel of the other panels? What else about the painting is satirical?

Kent based this work on a masterpiece by Hieronymus Bosch titled The Garden of Earthly Delights. [Note: Some of the figures in the Bosch painting are nude.] How do the paintings relate to each other in composition, color, narrative, tone, and purpose?

Would you like to ask the artist a question? Here’s his email.

Share with us

Why not try your hand at writing art criticism? Take one of the questions above (or create your own), and write a short essay (less than 200 words) to answer this question, “How do you interpret Secrets of the Great Salt Lake?” Send it to us (include your first name and the city where you live), and we’ll post it, below.