SANDWICH
ART HISTORY
Grade One - Art All Around
Lesson 3 –‘‘Colors make shapes"
INTRODUCTION
Last month we saw art everywhere. Today we'll talk about how that art was made. Color, shapes and lines are just as important to an artist as his tools and materials. Let's examine color and how artists use it with shapes to make paintings.
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Thoughts on color that may be used throughout the lesson.
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Imagine how to describe color to a blind person. The shape of a color often gives us different feelings about that color. For example, red can be a sign of danger in a stoplight or it can be a sign of love in a rose or heart. Green can be a sign of joy and hope in spring or cold and depressing in the decay of moldy food.
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Are the colors and shapes harmonious or contrasting? An harmonious composition can include contrasting color if the colors and shapes are in harmonious proportions. Contrasting colors stand apart so we see a difference between them and have a feeling pf change and visual movement. The contrasts can be light and dark or warm and cool. Opposite, complimentary colors on the color wheel vibrate against each other.
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Think about warm and cool colors. What color combinations do you see in nature?
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Are the colors pure or grayed (intense or soft)?
MATERIALS
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1. Color Wheel Palette, Graphic
3. Felt Board and Shapes, Materials for Old King
2. The Old King, 1936, Georges Roualt, French (1871-1958)
Oil on canvas, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Use the felt board and shapes to recreate the "Old King". Talk about the colors using the color wheel palette. Does the Old King remind you of a stained glass window in a church.? Why is the Old King carrying flowers? Why might they be white?
4. Flower Petals, Henri Matisse, French (1869-1954) paper on canvas,
Collection Galerie Beyeler
Matisse cut shapes out of brightly colored paper. What do the shapes and colors suggest.?
He carefully placed the shapes, repeating shapes to create movement and pleasing composition.
Matisse uses lines as lines and shapes as shapes - playing with the variations.
Henri Matisse was the leader of the Fauve movement and one of the most creative French artists of the 20th century. his early years in Paris were spent working in the studio of Gustave Moreau and in copying the old masters in the Louvre. The development of his style reflects the influence of contemporary artistic currents. Finding Impressionists' and Divisionists' use of color limited, Matisse forged ahead until his artistic vision reached its logical conclusion in fauvism. The exaltation of bright color, arrayed and controlled in simple flat areas, found expression in a wide range of subjects; still lifes, interior scenes, odalisques, and portraits. Criticized in France, Matisse found encouragement in the patronage of Gertrude Stein and the Russian collectors., Stchonkine and Rocosoff, who helped gain recognition for his work. Matisse settled in Nice in 1917 and continued to explore the possibilities of light and color., deliberately and eloquently reduced to their essentials. Examples of his meticulous method are to be seen in his careful pen sketches whose sharp clean lines result in spontaneous purity. Bedridden after a serious operation in 1941, Matisse began to experiment with brightly-painted paper which he cut into imaginative shapes and arranged in vivacious compositions. The culmination of Matisse's creative activity is visible today in the Dominican Chapel at Venice, for which he designed everything from the stained glass windows, the liturgical objects and vestments to the tiles on the roof and the cross on the tower. The total effect of the stark white walls with black-lines drawings opposite shimmering blue-green windows is one of a radiantly spiritual serenity.
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves, a group of early twentieth-century modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism.
Use this paper to show the variety of colors you can achieve by mixing red and blue.
Which colors have more blue? More red? Matisse used similar paper for his cutouts.
5. Color-aid Paper
Additional materials by Matisse:
The Snail is a collage by Henri Matisse. The work was created from summer 1952 to early 1953. It is pigmented with gouache on paper, cut and pasted onto a base layer of white paper measuring 9'4​³⁄â‚„" × 9' 5". Have the kids try to guess what is being shown here before you tell them its name!
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The Purple Robe was completed in 1937. It depicts Matisse's assistant. This painting is an example of Henri Matisse's mature decorative style. Matisse depicts his model in an exotic Moroccan costume, surrounded by a complex of abstract design and exotic color. This is an example of one of the final groups of oil paintings in Matisse's career.
L'esgargot by Henri Matisse
The Purple Robe by Henri Matisse
6. Iris, 1954, Morris Louis, American (1912-1962 ) Reproduction Print
Morris Louis Bernstein was an American painter known for Abstract Expressionism. During the 1950s he and a group of artists were central to the development of Color Field painting. The basic point about Louis's work and that of other Color Field painters, sometimes known as the Washington Color School in contrast to most of the other new approaches of the late 1950s and early 1960s, is that they greatly simplified the idea of what constitutes the look of a finished painting.
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- How many shapes can you find?
- Are they formed by the colors or the lines?
- Name the colors. Are they grayed or bright?
- Do they remind you of a flower?
- Explain how this picture is different from Matisse's "Flower Petals"
- How does this painting make you feel?
Born in Wisconsin, O'Keefe studied in Wisconsin, Chicago and New York. She never painted the human figure, concentrating instead on close-up views of flowers for which she is best known. These paintings reveal elemental shapes common to many natural forms. Nature offered forms or shapes that could be removed from their original context and made into art. Clean contours and smooth shapes and simplified forms - Black Iris magnifies each element.
6. Black Iris, 1926, Georgia O'Keeffe, American (1887-1986)
