Kindergarten: Fabulous Feasts!

Many artists use food as subject matter for their work, and food is often present at celebrations of all kinds. Kindergarten students have spent the past few months focused on the many aspects of celebration: masks and costumes, party drawings and now feast collages! After identifying what a “feast” is, students discussed the selected food-related artworks before listing their own favorite foods they would enjoy.
Students were then instructed to create a feast by cutting out appropriate shapes and colors to represent various foods, imagining the colored paper background as their “tabletop”. Small details and texture could be added using oil pastels, and students were encouraged to include and think about other table-setting objects such as dishes, flatware and drinking glasses.

February Masterpiece of the Month: Two Dancers On A Stage by Edgar Degas

Who made it?

This painting was created by a French artist named, Edgar Degas, in 1874.

Where is the REAL one?

The real painting can be seen at The Courtauld Gallery in London, England.

Why is this artwork important?

Throughout his career, Degas loved to create artwork that depicted moving subjects, such as people and animals in motion. Of the many artworks Degas created, many of them were of ballet dancers, for which he has now become famous. Degas admired the dancer's ability to function like a graceful machine that could crouch, turn, twist and stretch. He saw them as creatures of muscle and bone whose grace and lightness were the result of incredibly hard work. Degas observed dancers backstage at classes and rehearsals, as well as performances. His pictures of dancers appear as though they were created right on the spot. In fact, they were created in his studio, from memory and from quick sketches. Using pastels or thick brushstrokes, Degas could re-create the glow of stagelights upon the dancers, such as the bright light in the Two Dancer's skirts. In every sense, Two Dancers is a typical Impressionist painting, a style that Degas is recognized as working within. Its use of light and its effect on color, its depiction of a scene taken from everyday life and rendered in heavy, quick brushstrokes to capture the movement are all important signs of an Impressionist picture.

February Master of the Month: Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. Recognized as an important artist in his lifetime, Degas is now considered to be one of the founders of an art style known as Impressionism, a style in which artists painted the overall idea of subjects from everyday life, filled with light and color. Degas disliked the term, and preferred to be called a realist, an artist who depicts scenes from real life, in a very realistic style. Degas’ work shows amazing technical skill. He is especially known for using the subject of dance, and over half of his works depict dancers. These artworks clearly show his mastered ability to show movement in a still work of art.

Though he created artwork in many different styles, his involvement with the other major artists of Impressionism and their exhibitions, his dynamic paintings and sketches of everyday life and activities, and his bold color experiments, served to connect him to the Impressionist movement as one of its greatest artists.

Kindergarten: Stick Puppets

Kindergarteners wrapped up their costuming unit with a lesson on constructing stick puppets. This was also a good segway into our next lessons which will be about celebrations. Students were first shown reproductions of the above artworks and led through a discussion with a series of questions:

“What are the people doing?”

“What are the people wearing?”

“What have the artists repeated in these artworks?” (lines, shapes, colors, patterns, positions of figures, costumes and uniforms)

Children were especially guided to notice the interesting clothing worn by the performers depicted in each of these artworks, and were then told they would be constructing stick puppets of people wearing interesting costumes. Students were first instructed to draw the shape of the person onto a piece of oak tag, then cut out the person using scissors, and finally decorating their puppets using a variety of collage materials made available at their table.

Grade One: Warm and Cool Colors

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To introduce a unit on color, first graders discussed the difference between "warm" colors (red, yellow, orange) and "cool" colors (blue, green, purple). Students were able to see how an artist depicting a warm place such as Georgia O'Keeffe's, Red Hills and Bones, and cool places such as Claude Monet's, Waterlilies, can be emphasized using these groups of colors. They also noticed that we associate certain warm or cool things, such as fire and water, with their colors, which help us to distinguish these colors even more.

Students were then asked to create an oil pastel drawing using their own subject matter in either warm or cool colors. While it was fine to use other colors as well, students had to decide whether to use mostly warm or cool colors.

Grade Two: Gyotaku Fish Printing, Old and New

Students in the second grade took their previous printmaking experience from earlier grades to new levels with the introduction of this lesson. Gyotaku printing was traditionally practiced in Japan several centuries ago as a way for Japanese fisherman to record particularly memorable catches before it influenced artists and developed into an artform. Students discussed this technique and its history before examining several examples of gyotaku prints by contemporary artists who have stretched the boundaries of this traditional technique in new creative directions.

Students were then told that they would be combining traditional and new techniques of gyotaku printing in an artwork of their own. First, students were shown a demonstration of printing in the traditional method using black tempera paint and rubber fish models. Thin paper was placed on the rubber fish and gently rubbed to create a print. Then, students were ready to try the technique on their own.

Once completed, the second step was to create a backgroud with which to mount their fish print. Students were given a variety of materials, including watercolor and collage and encouraged to combine materials and utilize previously learned techniques, such as watercolor resist and wet on wet painting, to create interesting and vibrant effects to highlight their fish print.

January Masterpiece of the Month: The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough

Who made it?

This painting was created by an English artist named, Thomas Gainsborough, in 1770.

Where is the REAL one?

The real painting can be seen at The Huntington Collection Library in San Marino, CA.

Why is this artwork important?

The Blue Boy is Gainsborough's most famous artwork out of the hundreds he painted. It is believed to be the portrait of the son of a wealthy merchant, however, there is no proof. Most likely it is a tribute to a much earlier artist, Anthony Van Dyck (1559-1641), whom Gainsborough greatly admired. We know this because the portrait features historical costume. The Blue Boy is wearing clothing that was in fashion over a hundred years before this picture was painted. In fact, The Blue Boy bears a strong resemblance to Van Dyck's painting, George and Francis Villiers, which is another portrait of young boys dressed in cavalier costumes.

While being a successful portrait painter, Gainsborough prefered to paint landscapes and would often try to work natural scenery into the portrait backgrounds as he does in The Blue Boy. However, what makes this painting so striking from Gainsborough's other works is the strong, dignified pose of the boy, the glow of his face from the darker background, and the highlighting on his satin suit and left leg as it steps forward. These subtle elements show us Gainsborough's mastery of skill as a painter.

January Master of the Month: Thomas Gainsborough

Thomas Gainsborough is best known as an English portrait painter. He was well-known during his lifetime, painting the portraits of the English King and Queen and other important people, yet he had little interest in painting portraits and prefered to paint landscapes, instead. For this reason, Gainsborough would often include natural scenery in the background of many of his portraits.Due to his fame, Gainsborough was able to help establish the Royal Academy of the Arts in London, which became a famous institution for artists to exhibit their work and a school to educate people about art. Gainsborough was admired for the speed with which he applied his paint, and he worked more from his observations of nature than from any formal rules. His later work was characterized by a light palette and easy, quick strokes.

Grade One: Drawing Animal Textures

Students in the first grade have been learning how artists use the element of texture in their work. For this lesson, students examined how artists use pattern and line to give the illusion of texture in a drawing, painting or print that is actually smooth in surface texture. Students first looked at several photography examples which depicted many kinds of different textures and were asked to use their eyes to identify and describe the textures they saw. Then, first graders were shown several examples of animal drawings by different artists and were led to notice that line variations, shapes and patterns must be made to convey differences in hair length, scale size or bumpy skin.

Students were then asked to choose a photograph of an animal to draw using colored pencils and crayons and were required to draw the texture of that particular animal as they saw it in the photograph. Students were also instructed to give consideration to coloring, scale and proportion.

Grade Three: Monochromatic Paintings about Feelings

Third graders began this lesson by viewing several selections of reproductions taken from Pablo Picasso's blue period and were asked if they noticed anything similar about the pictures depicted. Students were quick to notice that the dominant color in each of the pictures was the color blue, although students also noticed that the people in each image appeared very sad, lonely and poor. As students were led through a discussion of these observations, they were informed of that fact that all these pictures were also painted by the same artist, and were given a brief background on how Picasso came to enter a "blue period" in his work due to a personal tragedy and difficult turning point in the artist's life. Students were led to notice how Picasso used a monochromatic color scheme to capture the feeling of these subjects.

Students were then asked about events or memories which made them feel a particular way: "What makes you feel excited? happy? angry? afraid?" Students were told to choose something which generated a strong feeling for them and depict it in a monochromatic painting in the color which would best communicate the feeling of their idea. Students were instructed to use and mix different values of the same color in order to depict their image most effectively.