Friday, May 23, 2014

Planting a Rainbow at Lincoln School


 Spring is here!  There are so many types of flowers and they all have their beginnings as either seeds or bulbs.  Lois Ehlert's book, Planting a Rainbow, provides a rudimentary explanation of how flowers grow.  
In art, we used her book to demonstrate the color wheel through different floral compositions.  Look closely and you'll see how students arranged their flowers in ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) order.  They carefully drew, traced and cut out their flowers to create a variety that echoed Ehlert's illustrations.  They are currently on display in the main hallway.


Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Rizzi City

Rizzi is a legendary pop art artist from New York. Born 1950 in Brooklyn.

He created step by step his own colorful world, full of happy pictures, which spray a vision of happy lifetime and joy.  

“Much of my work is about New York City, but above all it is about the people, about how they live. 

New York is a multicultural society where people with all kinds of cultural backgrounds, religions and languages are living together in harmony. 


In my work I want to portray the positive side of New York, I want to show how privileged we are to have such a rich and diverse society and that living together in such a community can be a lot of fun.”

James Rizzi video



Matisse Windsocks


In 1941 Matisse was diagnosed with cancer and, following surgery, he started using a wheelchair.  However, Matisse’s extraordinary creativity was not be dampened for long. “Une seconde vie”, a second life, was what he called the last fourteen years of his life. Following an operation he found renewed  and unexpected energies and the beautiful Russian-born assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya, to keep him company. 
Vast in scale (though not always in size), lush and rigorous in color, his cutouts are among the most admired and influential works of Matisse’s entire career.  By maneuvering scissors through prepared sheets of paper, he inaugurated a new phase of his career.
We applied the concept of cutting paper to make shapes found in Matisse’s famous cut paper compositions.  The composition was rolled and turned into a windsock to prove that art can take on many forms and functions – some as whimsical as the works Matisse drew with his scissors!

Michael Hall: Author Visit

On March 7, Michael Hall the author of My Heart is Like a Zoo and Perfect Square, visited our Treehouse and shared his book, It's an Orange Aardvark!  To welcome him to our school, we read My Heart is Like a Zoo and Perfect Square and created some artwork inspired by his illustrations.  

Kindergarten students used painted scraps of paper to cut and design environments for their animal pictures.  Their children had to include at least one heart in their animal composition, just like Michael Hall's pictures.  The created homes, forests, and other environments with additional scraps.  Finally, they shared a narrative of their composition to help the viewer appreciate the context of their image.

Jackson Pollock Birdies

 Eva Crawford is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina.  She loves to work with mixed media and teaches high school art.  Her 3 little birds, like the Bob Marley song, sit waiting on her doorstep!
Students sponged and splatter painted a large piece of paper in the style of Crawford and Jackson Pollock.  Later, we cut them into bird shapes and gave them beaks, eyes and legs with oil pastels.  They're currently hanging in the main hallway.

Clay Fortune Cookies

Second grade students created beautiful pop art inspired fortune cookies.  They were able to craft the extra large clay cookies after a few practice rounds making small fortune versions.  

Students designed their cookies with a theme which they later applied to their cookie with sharpie and watercolors.  Later, they designed take out containers to match the theme of their cookies.