Speaking about Art Reading

1.

2.

Warm-up
WHAT KIND OF DANCES DO
YOU KNOW?
I know classical dances like
(polka/waltz/…).
I was also taught
rumba/samba/tango…) and some
other (Latin American/…)dances.

3.

Warm-up
WHAT MUSICAL
INSTRUMENTS ARE POPULAR
AMONG TEENAGERS?
Teenagers often play
(guitar/keyboard/…) and dream of
having their own band.
(Strings/percussion
instruments/…) have also become
popular recently.

4.

Warm-up
DO PEOPLE OFTEN VISIT
CINEMA THESE DAYS?
Many people prefer to watch lms on(TV/satellites/cable
television/…) in their cozy homes.
On the other hand, cinemas offer (better sound features/
special atmosphere/better quality of the lm/…).

5.

Warm-up
WHO ARE YOUR FAVOURITE
PAINTERS?
I like (the portraitist/ the landscaper/the
surrealist/…).
I nd his/her paintings really (interesting/
unusual/...).

6.

Brainstorming

7.

Add other words to the network
Brainstorming
ART
works
of art
paintings
Places where
you
can see art
museums
exhibitions
artists
musicians

8.

Speaking
Ask and answer the following
questions in pairs.

9.

Vocabulary

10.

Reading
Read the text and say what of a greater interest for the girl is: the
stories, she imagines watching pictures, or technical things, the
painters use in their works.
THE PICTURE
(after ‘The Broken Bridge’ by Ph. Pullman)
Ginny, the main character of the story, is 16. She’s turning out to be
a brilliant artist like her mother, who died when she was a baby. In the
extract you’re going to read Ginny sees her mother’s picture in the art
gallery.
When Ginny was first becoming interested in art and the history of
painting, Dad had given her a big book with hundreds of reproductions
in it. She’d pored over it with more than delight — with a kind of
greed, in fact. She absorbed everything the book told her about the
Renaissance, and the Impressionists, and the Cubists, about Boticelli and
Monet and Picasso, and she breathed it all in like oxygen she hadn’t
known she was missing. And among the pictures in the book, there
were two that made her gasp.

11.

Reading
One was Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black, the portrait of his
mother sitting on an upright chair, and the other was El Greco’s View of Toledo. She
remembered her reaction quite clearly: a sudden intake of breath, caused by sheer
surprise at the arrangement of shapes and colours. It was a physical shock.
And when she looked at the big painting that dominated the end
wall, the same thing happened. It would have affected her the same
way whoever had painted it, because it was a masterpiece. What it
showed was a middle-aged black man, in a uniform with epaulettes
and medals, in the act of falling on to the red-carpeted floor
of a well furnished room. He’d been eating a meal, and on the table
beside him there was a plate of yellow soup. Beyond him, through the
open door and at the open window, stood a crowd of people, watching:
white people and black, old and young, richly dressed and povertystricken. Some of them carried objects that helped you understand
who they were: a wad of dollar bills for a banker, a clutch of guns
for an arms dealer, a chicken for a peasant; and the expressions on
their faces told Ginny that they’d all in some ways been victims or
accomplices of the man who was dying.
Arrangement in Grey and Black,
Whistler

12.

Reading
And all that was important, but just as important was the strange
discord of the particular red of the carpet and the particular yellow
of the soup, so that you knew it was something signi cant, and you
guessed the soup had been poisoned. And the way the dying man
was isolated by the acid red from every other shape in the picture, so
that it looked as if he were sinking out of sight in a pool of blood.
And mainly what was important was the thing that was impossible to
put into words: the arrangements of the shapes on the canvas. These
same elements put together differently would have been an interesting
picture, but put together like this, they made Ginny catch her breath.
She began thinking of what her mother had wanted to say by the
picture. Tell the story of the corrupt officer?
Yes… But not mainly. What she had probably wanted to do was just
to see what happened when she put that red and that yellow together.
That was what could start it. Some little technical thing like that. And
the shape of the man as he falls… Because there’s no shadow, you
can’t see easily where he is in relation to the floor. He seems to be
oating in space, almost. But at the same time no one could say that
the picture wasn’t technically correct. It was amazing, brilliant! Ginny
felt a lump in her throat.
View of Toledo, El Greco

13.

PostReading
Choose the right answer (a-c) to each question.
6. What did Ginny’s mother
want to express by painting
her masterpiece?
a) She wanted to tell a story.
b) She wanted to experiment
with some painting
techniques.
c) She wanted to tell a story
and make it more effective by
using some special techniques.

14.

PostReading
In the text, find the words which mean the following:
1 to study something closely
2 to take something in gradually
3 straight up
4 to have the most important noticeable place
5 with furniture in it
6 a person who works on the land
7 a person who helps another person to do wrong
8
special, distinctive
9 extremely unnaturally bright
10 important, meaningful
11 not near any others, separated
12 some liquid poured or dropped on a surface
13 practising the dishonest use of power and position

15.

Speaking
Say when people experience such
feelings or behave in the following
way. Give examples.

16.

Speaking
Complete the sentences.
Take turns in pairs.
1 My preference lies with the genre of portrait because …
2 I personally like genre paintings. They are …
3 I prefer landscape to other genres. You see …
4 I care much for still lives …
5 I prefer battle pieces …
Useful language
to express themselves, to inspire others, to depict the beauty of...,
to record history, to share emotions and thoughts, a cultural tradition,
self-identification, aesthetics , to love and value the art pieces, to learn about the past,
to enjoy art and culture, to expand smb`s minds