A Brush With Colours

Recently we went to The Wallace Collection to take part in a Rubens-inspired, All Things Light and Beautiful: Colour and Painting Workshop.

The workshop started with a gallery session where the guide introduced the children to two of Rubens' paintings while discussing the artist's use of primary and secondary colours to depict light and darkness in the paintings.

The children were then asked to make a sketch of the Rubens paintings for ideas that they might want to use back in the art studio to create their own landscape paintings based on the principles they have learnt in the morning, of:

• primary and secondary colours;
• complementary colours; and
• warm and cool colours.

The afternoon session of the workshop started with the a discussion of how artists in the 17th century would have had to find ways to create the colours they wanted either by grinding up natural materials such as earth and beetles, or through mixing primary colours to create secondary colours.

The children then had a chance to apply what they have learnt to create their very own Rubens-inspired, colourful landscape masterpiece.

We came home and learnt a little bit more about Peter Paul Rubens by ourselves by looking at a few prints.

I then looked around and found that the Royal Academy of Arts is currently holding an exhibition  that showcases Rubens' works alongside those of other famous artists (such as van Dyck, Cezanne, Turner) whose works and styles were influenced by him.

So off we went to see the Rubens and His Legacy exhibition.

After going round the exhibition, we took part in a workshop where we first looked at how Rubens positioned his subjects in The Lion Hunt, then we were to use pastels to quickly sketch the positions in two minutes.  The exercise was to give us a taste of the thoughts that an artist would have gone into in the compositional phase.

Following that, we were given copies of contemporary photographs as well as Rubens' paintings to make our own collage.  We were given time to position the photographs on a black sheet of paper before using pastels to enhance our composition.  Once we were happy with our collages, we were to use charcoal to draw our compositions out.

Here are our results.  Tiger drew his composition based on his collage.

I was happy enough with my collage to stop there and then.

**Update on June 27th, 2016:
I was contacted by Artsy, a website that collates artists' bio, high quality pictures of of the artists' works, exclusive articles, and up-to-date exhibition listings around the world.  As this is a Rubens blog post, I am linking to the Rubens page where you can learn more about the artist. The page even includes related artist & category tags, plus suggested contemporary artists.  Well worth a visit!


This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 3/10/15
2. Finishing Strong - Homeschooling the Middle & High School Years Week 46
3. The Virtual Refrigerator
4. Collage Friday: Faces of American History
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with the learner's permit!
6. My Week in Review #28

A Cut Above the Rest

We went to the Tate Modern to see Matisse's Cut-Outs exhibition.

Matisse had a very long art career, but it was in the last 10 years of his life that he focused on collage work, which became his best known works.

When we got home, Tiger read up on Matisse's biographies and discussed the works we saw in the exhibition using the post cards bought at the exhibition.  We discussed Matisse's use of colours, his placements of the various shapes, and his use of representational shapes.  Tiger says his favourite pieces of work from the exhibition are the Large Decoration with Mask, followed by The Sheaf.

While seeing the original works gave us a good personal experience with the artist's creation, we found the following video very informative in helping us appreciate Matisse's collage work at a deeper level:

I wanted Tiger to practise some discipline in his collage work so I gave him a sticker book that requires him to replicate six pieces of Matisse's collage work.  At first, Tiger thought that the exercise could be completed very quickly because the sticker book looked  like it is meant for preschoolers.  However, as he started on the work, he soon found that duplicating a master's work accurately isn't such an easy task afterall.  The level of concentration required to reproduce masterpieces proved too much for Tiger after a while so he took two days to complete all six pieces.

After the initial exercise, Tiger was ready to make his own Matisse-inspired collage.  Matisse went to Tahiti to get inspirations for his colourful cut-outs.  While I did not send Tiger to Tahiti to get inspiriation, I did send him to look at our very colourful flower bed to get ideas on the interactions of shapes and colours.

Once Tiger had his ideas formulated, he started work.  In the spirit of emulating Matisse, Tiger used the biggest pair of scissors in the house and cut the shapes out directly, without any preliminary sketching.

The only suggestion I offered Tiger was to keep using the postcard copies of Matisse's work as his reference.  Once Tiger cut out all the shapes he wanted and arranged them in the way that reflected the ideas he had, he then made a few more changes to the arrangements on the paper before the cut-outs were finally glued down.

Here is the happy artist with his work:

Has anyone noticed the influence of our brief encounter with the jellyfish a week or so ago?

When Tiger showed me his final product, I was quite impressed because:

• he did it all by himself;
• he cut all the shapes freehand;
• the work is very lively and is full of energy;
• he has paid attention to the lesson and has made mental notes of Matisse's work because the master's influence is clearly identifiable.

This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 7/22/14
2. Virtual Refrigerator
3. Weekly Wrap-up: The one where Charlotte returns
4. The Homeschool Mother's Journal (7/26/14)

Fashionably Klimt

On the last day of 2013, Tiger and I visited the National Gallery to see The Portrait in Vienna 1900 exhibition.

Although it was not strictly a solo exhibition of Gustav Klimt's, I used that visit as a launch pad for us to learn more about Klimt and his work.

There isn't much information on Klimt for children, probably because the erotic nature of his most famous late period of work and his rather promiscuous personal life don't lend themselves to be deemed suitable material for young children to study.  However, I was inspired by the non-erotic portraits we saw at the exhibition to study about this man's unique artistic style and its influence on modern day fashion and design.

We used postcards and prints of Klimt's work for our inspiration, to understand his use of contrasting background and colours.

 

Then we proceeded to work.

Below is Tiger's work process for this project:

1. We looked through a few magazines for Tiger to choose a pose which he liked.  Once he decided which pose he liked, he cut out the head and limbs of the model from the page
2. The cut-outs were carefully glued onto a pre-selected piece of construction paper.
3. Tiger drew the outline of the clothing on paper.
4. Then he selected the patterned papers that he wanted to use.
5. We looked at Klimt's prints again and talked about the interweaving patterns on his paintings.  This discussion made Tiger understand that he should think about variations in how he cut the patterned papers.
6. The cut-out patterns were arranged onto the paper, within the outline that Tiger had drawn.  Once he was happy with how the patterned papers were arranged, he glued each piece on carefully, making further adjustments to the way each piece was cut accordingly.

Other than the proportion of the human body being really out of whack, I think the dress is really quite funky.  I would probably wear a dress with such a loud pattern if I were 20 years younger.


This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 3/4/14
2. Virtual Refrigerator Blog Hop 
3. Entertaining and Educational - Quotes and Strewing
4. Collage Friday - We All Need Encouragement
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The One Where I Got Up Early
6. The Homeschool Mother's Journal (3/8/14)