Ellsworth Kelly's White Blue (1960) was my favourite. I liked the clean, intense, simple colours. The description beside it said that it was based on the magnification of a drawing of an apple.

I didn't do this one while looking at it; A+ wanted to keep moving on. I remember it felt a little brighter than the picture from A line on Ellsworth Kelly | Foyer, though, but maybe not quite this blue. My white forms don't feel as rounded and as organic as the ones in the original. Anyway, I liked the swooshiness of White Blue.

I liked the hard black and white lines of Guido Molinari's Multinoir (1962) more than Gene Davis's Black Panther (1970), which made my eyes a little wibbly-wobbly. (How does it do that? Interesting…)

I liked the airbrushing of Rita Letendre's Daybreak (1983). The orange made me think of sunset more than sunrise, though. It was interesting to contrast the hard lines of Multinoir and White Blue with the airbrushed softness of Daybreak and the brushiness of Mark Rothko's No.1, White and Red (1962).

I brought our iPads so that we could try some digital painting. A+ didn't find anything in the modern art exhibit that inspired her at that moment, so she asked a volunteer for directions back to the Canadian landscape gallery from our previous trip.

After looking at a few paintings, A+ decided to draw her own landscape with snowy mountain peaks. I revisited Lawren S. Harris's South Shore, Bylot Island (1931) from our last trip and used it to practise painting on my new iPad Air.

It was fun trying to get a sense of light and shadow. I like the yellow-white and shade of the snow on the mountains. I could dial down the saturation a bit.

On the way back, I mused on how Harris had been painting for decades before he made that painting, and even then, he had done quite a few studies of that scene before settling on that particular painting. So it totally makes sense that these first attempts have a long way to go.

We could check out that Letendre/Morrisseau exhibit I mentioned earlier (Gallery 126), maybe tied to some experiments with airbrushes in Procreate. A+ and her class did a Morrisseau-inspired art project with lots of bright colours, so I think that part might appeal to her too. She's also enjoyed playing "Spot the Difference" with similar paintings, so that might be good to do with Norval Morrisseau's Man Changing into Thunderbird (1977).

A+ mentioned looking forward to the Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirrored Room installation this April, so we'll probably be back for that one. Two years ago, A+ and her class did two art projects inspired by Kusama's pumpkins. One was a drawing exploring polka dots, and another was a three-dimensional pumpkin made out of strips of paper and photographed between mirrors for an infinity(ish) effect. I think A+ will enjoy seeing the scaled-up version.

For amusement, here's my version of the pumpkin drawing project:

A+ finds it easier to learn about art when I'm learning beside her, and I'm glad to be able to go through these lessons and prompts with a grown-up's patience and curiosity.

As it turns out, the AGO collection website does not include all of their objects (or maybe I just can't find it with the search), so I'll take more pictures next time, and I'll bring A+'s camera too.

How lucky we are to be able to learn about art with this kind of resource!