Sentinel Staff Writer

Great art and great literature share many attributes -- mood, tone, point-of-view. There are dozens of details that distinguish a work from a work of art. It's those details that McPherson High School English teacher Valerie Stout hopes her students have gained an appreciation of after completing a recent project.

Forty-seven students in Stout's AP English Lit. and college-bound English classes, with some help from friends and family, recreated scenes from a piece of art they selected for the project.

Some students, like Hunter Hess, chose to recreate the entire scene. Hess, who chose Norman Rockwell's “A Tough One,” replicated all of the elements from the background to the furniture to using his father as the other subject in the painting.

“It allowed us to explore things like details within our literature and also look at point of view because we had to write an accompanying poem to go with it. So it expressed the point of view of not only those within the painting but the artists as well,” Hess said.

Other students chose to use computer programs such as Photoshop to put themselves in the picture. Eric Goering chose to do “Vietnam Reflections,” a painting of the Vietnam Memorial wall. Goering was surprised at how difficult striking just the right pose was.

“My arm by the end of the night was very, very tired and sore. I worked really hard at trying to get my arm and elbows and fingers positioned properly to match the painting,” Goering said.

Austin Russell chose “Young Boy in the Sun” for his project because he thought the boy in the picture looked like a younger version of himself. Russell also used Photoshop in his project and found the hardest part was finding the right clothes.

Each student was also required to write a poem from the point of view of the subject in the painting.

“They did a great job with it. I had a lot of kids who worked three, four and five hours on it to get it just right. The whole point of the project was to focus on detail to the point where you try and get the picture exactly like the original. That was the goal of it. And the reason for that is we're studying detail in literature just that way and detail in writing just that way,” Stout said.

McPherson Unified School District 418
514 N. Main
McPherson, KS 67460
620-241-9400
It is the policy of McPherson USD 418 not to discriminate on the basis of sex, disability, race,
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