SANDWICH
ART HISTORY
Grade Two - Art and Observation
Lesson 1 – Art Helps Us to See - Point of View
MATERIALS
1. Farmer in the Field, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch, (1853-1890), oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reproduction print
Vincent van Gogh grew up in an educated Dutch family; his father was a minister and his uncle an art dealer. He pursued many careers such as teacher, art dealer, and missionary preacher. His generosity, compassion and deep desire to understand his fellow men were misunderstood by the Belgian coal miners with whom he lived and to whom he preached until his dismissal in 1880. Around this time he began to sketch copies of Jean Francois Millet's somber peasants and later to take anatomy and perspective lessons in Brussels. Van Gogh's early self-training showed intense visual perception which developed into a sinuous, flame-like style with brilliant colors. At the age of 33 he moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo. There he was influenced by the Impressionists, Pointiallists, and by the flat planes and vigorous outlines of Japanese prints. After moving to St. Remy and in Auvers, where he died, he painted vivid passionate works, expressive of his tormented life.
Van Gogh's Farmer in the Field reflects his use of brilliant colors and the influence of the "flat planes and vigorous outlines" of Japanese prints. His brush strokes, though somewhat larger and thicker than the Impressionists and Pointiallists, still demonstrate their influence upon his style. It is obvious that Farmer in the Field is his perception of the scene. He places little emphasis on figures; the two workers in the center are merely blue outlines, dwarfed by the landscape. The right-hand figure, also blue, is a whole person, although its sex is not easily determined. The figure is balanced precariously on the lurching, rushing landscape which is divided horizontally into four bands of color (red, green, yellow and blue).
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Note: Van Gogh's Farmer in the Field and Millet's The Gleaners are included in this lesson for comparison.
2. The Gleaners, 1857, Jean Francois Millet, French, (1814-1875), oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris. Reproduction print
Jean Francois Millet was the son of a French peasant. For a brief time he trained under a local Cherbourg artist and then under Delaroche in Paris where he was also influenced by Daumier. In 1849 he settled in Barbizon and painted genre subjects of peasants at work and prayer. The Gleaners and The Angelus are among his most representative works. Both are sentimental and romantic scenes executed in a realistic style.
These quotes may help you enjoy the prints by Millet and Van Gogh. They are from The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.:
"The wood is becoming quite autumnal - there are effects of colour which I rarely find painted in Dutch pictures."
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"Yesterday towards evening I was busy painting a rather sloping ground in the wood, covered with mouldered and dry beech leaves. That ground was light and dark reddish brown, made more so by the shadows of trees which threw more or less dark streaks over it, sometimes half blotted out. The question was, and I found it very difficult to get the depth of colour, the enormous force and solidness of that ground - and while painting it I perceived only for the first time how much light there still was in that dusk - to keep that light, and to keep at the same time the glow and depth of that rich colour."
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"For you cannot imagine any carpet so splendid as the deep brownish-red, in the glow of an autumn evening sun, tempered by the trees."
"From that ground young beech trees spring up which catch light on one side and are sparkling gleen there, and the shadowy side of those stems are a warm deep black-green."
"Behind those saplings, behind that brownish-red soil is a sky very delicate, bluish grey, warm, hardly blue, all aglow - and against it is a hazy border of green and a network of little stems and yellowish leaves. a few figures of wood gatherers are wandering around like dark masses of mysterious shadows. The white cap of a woman, who is bending to reach a dry branch, stands out all of a sudden against the deep red-brown of the ground. A skirt catches the light - a shadow fails - a dark silhouette of a man appears above the underbrush. A white bonnet, a cap, a shoulder, the bust of a woman moulds itself against the sky. Those figures, they are large and full of poetry - in the twilight of that deep shadowy tone they appear as enormous clay figureines being shaped in a studio."
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"While painting it I said to myself: 'I must not go away before there is something of an autumn evening air about it, something mysterious, something serious."
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Van Gogh admired Millet tremendously. Speaking of the developement of art :
"Up to Millet and Jules Breton... there was always in my opinion progress, but to surpass these two - don't even mention it! I must have a a foundation in these artists."
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Van Gogh wanted his figures to live, not to be academically correct. He believed that Millet painted figures as he felt them; he painted the truth of the laborer in action. Both Van Gogh and Millet painted the close connection of the peasant to the earth. How?
4. False Mirror, 1928, Rene Magritte, Belgian (1898-1967), oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York, reproduction print.
Rene Magritte was a well-known surrealist painter born in Lessines, Belgium. He began to draw and paint at the age of twelve and demonstrated n early taste for the unusual and the bizarre. He studied art intermittently and in about 1918 Magrittebegan to search for a personal painting style. His earliest work showed the influence of Futurism and by the early 1920s a form of cubism became apparnet in his painting. As artistic movements and he evolved a personal style which emphasized the meaning to an overriding aesthetic effort.
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Of Magritte, Suzi Gablik wrote: "When it came to painting, he manifested an almost constitutional dislike, feigning something between boredom, fatigue and disgust." Magritte's is everyman's Surrealist and universally admired. His paintings commend themselves, at least in reproduction, for their craftsmanship and finish, and they appear almost Super-realist. His work is dead-pan initially - the viewer takes a few seconds to realize what is wrong with the scene depicted. Being unaware of the meaning of the various symbols he uses is unimportant and does not detract from an appreciation of the disjnction between the real world and his depiction of it. It is in these slight and subtle shifts in meaning that his Surrealism lies. His speciality - the painting within a painting - is a further example of this disjunction; it is at once bith a mystical experience which allows us to question the nature of reality and also the basis for considerable semantic speculation. There is no apparent reason or consistency in Magritte's work - he delighted in ambiguity. If we truly appreciate it, we do the same.
What is wrong? What is real?
Modern Painting
~ Adams, Hugh, Mayflower Books, Inc NY 1979
5. Virgin Forest at Sunset, 1907, Henri Rousseau, French (1844-1910), oil on canvas, Kunstmuseum, Basel, reproduction print.
Rousseau was a French customs officer (un Douanier) who taught himself to paint by copying the masters in the Louvre. Later he exhibited at the Salon des Independants. Rousseau's tranquil jungle settings have a dreamlike quality and the forms of staring, hypnotic animals are rendered in a bold naive style. Many of his works reflect his lack of formal training - his past as a 'Sunday Painter' - in the flatness of forms, the labored detail, the meticulous but awkward finishing, the stiffness, the innacuracies of proportion and perspective and an aim of naivete. However, his paintings have something more. They have a decorative flair and an air of enchantment. Rousseau could not so much as copy a picture postcard (as he sometimes did) without transforming its trite realism into his own distinctive unreality. His often exotic subject matter intensifies and makes more obvious the other-wordliness inherent in all his work.
The Virgin at Sunset particularly comes to life when thinking about the sounds and noises in the jungle.
OTHER IDEAS:
• scents
• climate
• touch (example: are some plants prickly? some soft?)
• How does the person feel? Frightened? Brave?
• How would you feel?
Download Grade Two - Lesson Two Synopsis here
INTRODUCTION
There are as many ways to paint a picture as there are artists. Paintings help us to share a person's way of seeing. All artists look hard and think carefully about what they see.
These are not actual paintings, they are printed reproductions. However good they may be, printed reproductions are always very different from the original painting. To see paintings in their full glory you should visit an ar gallery or museum. But whether you are looking at the actual paintings or at reproductions, use our eyes and look.
An artist often has a difficult choice. Should he paint only hat he sees? Or should he paint what he knows is really there, even though it would be impossible to see it in real life? For example, some artists do not paint people exactly as they see them. They imagine how a perfect person would look, and take away all the faults and blemishes that exist in real life. On the other hand, many artists paint very realistically and include all the faults and imperfections.
Some painters do not want us to think about perfection or the exact way that people look. They want us to think about feelings. When you have strong desires or emotions they can very often seem to push you about in different directions. Artists sometimes distort faces on a person's face or body in real life.
Artists, as we have seen, have many ways of making pictures, but we should also realize that they paint for many reasons. Sometimes to make us imagine things we cannot see with our eyes or to make us share their dreams. Sometimes to make us think about ourselves and who we are. Sometimes just for the sake of showing the way pictures are made and how an artist uses things like colors, paint or brush strokes.
All great artists know that once you start to look and think and imagine, there is no reason ever to stop.
Just Look...A Book
About Painting
~ Cumming, Robert, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1979
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
- What did each artist want to say?
- How do the artists use light?
3. Haymaking, Pieter Breughal, Flemish (1525-1569), The Narodi Gallery, Prague, reproduction print.
Pieter Breughal was one of the greatest painters of the Netherlands. In 1551 he journeyed to Italy and was deeply impressed with the art of the High Renaissance and the dynamic landscape of Italy. He glorified the simple life of the peasants at work and play. Notice how he keeps our eyes moving around the picture by carefully spacing the colors and groups of people. He leaves out shadows and confusing details.
Grade Two - Art and Observation
Lesson 4 – Techniques and Media
INTRODUCTION
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Pretend a visit to an art store.
There are so many kinds of materials you might have a difficult time choosing the kind of art to do. Some artists today use even more common things we find around us such as rocks, dirt and junk from the dump.
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You could make something you can walk around - a sculpture; or something that moves around in space as you stand still - a mobile. You could make a picture on a flat wall or a painting to hang on a wall.
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Today we'll talk about the materials and tools an artist uses to paint or draw a flat picture to be framed:
You can go to an art store and buy the paint and brushes and surfaces to paint; they are already prepared. Long ago the artist had to grind minerals and rocks into colored dust called pigment. Then he had to decide which sticky substance to use to bind the color particles together in a paste. Some sticky things they used, and may still use are:
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Glue made from animal bone, skin, fats.
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Skimmed milk or cottage cheese mixed with lime.
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Beeswax
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Eggs
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Paste or oils made from plants.
Today we have scientists - chemists, in laboratories - who do all this work for us and package the paint in tubes. Even so, it's important to know as much as possible about the medium (sticky stuff that holds the pigment together) because then we can choose the best kind of brush and surface to decorate.
MATERIALS
1. Assorted Art Materials, BOX, Materials used for pencil sketches, pen & ink, charcoal drawing, pastels, watercolor, oil & acrylic painting.
DRAWING
Pencil, charcoal. There are many pencils, charcoals, chalks and crayons to choose from and just as many different kinds of papers. Usually a rough paper is chosen, but the artist must decide how smooth or textured, thick or thin, colored, gray or white. Note how the lights and shadows are drawn with a pencil.
PEN & INK
There is another way to draw. Artists took the materials from writers of words. There is a variety of pens - reed, quill, or steel. (The Chinese and Japanese even use a brush in the same way as a pen. They also have special inkstones and sticks to grind their own ink.) Today we have ball point pens and felt tip markers. Pen and ink is best done on smooth paper. Why?
PASTELS
Using pastels, you are both drawing and sort of painting. Pastel is color in its purest form, ground and pressed into sticks (very little binding material is added.) Some pastels have oil added to prevent smearing, or the finished pastel drawing can be sprayed with a fixative to keep it from smearing. You can mix and spread the color and make wonderfully soft edges by rubbing with your fingers or soft cloth. Any slightly rough paper is used - colored papers are preferred.
Look at Mary Cassat's Child in Red Hat and find where the color is rubbed out to a soft edge. See how the soft pink is repeated. Find the drawing lines where the pastel is used like a pencil. Do you think the soft subtle colors contribute to the feelings between mother and child?
WATERCOLOR
The name comes from what is used to thin the paint - water. Your school paints are a kind of watercolor - tempera - but they are thick to enable you to cover a large area smoothly. Also, with tempera you can't see through the colors, so you can paint one color over another dry color and cover mistakes.
Another kind of watercolor (pigments are bound with a different water-soluble medium than in poster paints) is more like your watercolor boxes. The artists' paints can be bought in tubes (or cakes). This paint requires a special paper (100% rag paper - heavier the better) to hold the wet paint on the surface long enough to be spread around evenly or to mix new colors into it. The brush is made specially to hold just the right amount of water and paint - it feels soft.
Artists choose these watercolors for their transparency - you can see the white of the paper behind the color (like light shining through). Often these paints are painted in thin layers or washes, so that you can see one color behind another. Have you ever noticed how your school poster paints are less intense in color as they dry? That's true of all watercolors, the more water, the duller color - and they dry quickly. The watercolor palette or dish is white so you can see the mixed color as it would appear on the paper with the whiteness shining through.
Look at "Light Coming on the Plains" by Georgia O'Keeffe. Notice the transparent colors which are put on the paper in layers or washes. (You can see the white paper shining through. the colors are more dull than in an oil painting.
OIL PAINTING
Think about the poster or tempera paints you use in school. How do they compare with these other kinds of paints?
Oil colors are pigments bound together with linseed or poppy oils. The paint has special qualities:
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The paints stay wet a long time - you can mix new colors into the wet paint.
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The paints can be thick or thinned with turpentine (water won't work, even the brushes must be cleaned with turpentine.)
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The colors are opaque - you can't see through them, so that when the paint dries, you can paint over mistakes or make changes. Oil paints can also be thinned to be transparent, almost like a watercolor.
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The colors stay the same brightness, even as they dry.
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The finished, dry picture is durable and doesn't need to be protected with glass.
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A special surface must be prepared from canvas stretched over a frame. oil paints may also be applied to other surfaces, such as wood, glass, metal or ivory.
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You can use a special palette and palette knife to mix and to thin colors.
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NEW TECHNOLOGIES
Acrylic paints are a modern invention which combine many of the properties of oils and watercolors.
These are only a few of the many ways to make art to hang on walls. We'll talk about some others, for example printmaking and photography, in a future lesson.
2. Hand drawn Porch Painting in 3 Mediums
Discuss materials used and qualities of each (Photo, pen and ink, watercolor)
3. Child in Red Hat, 1908, Mary Cassat, American (1844-1926),
Pastel on Paper, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA
Mary Cassatt is often considered to be America's most famous woman painter. She was born into a rich Pennsylvania family, but lived most of her life in Paris. Her early work there was rejected by the conservative salons, but in 1877 she was invited by Degas to exhibit with the Impressionists. Although she was close to Renoir, Manet and Cezanne, Degas remained the strongest influence on her art.
4. Light Coming Onto the Plains III, 1917, Georgia O’Keefe, American (1887-1986) Watercolor, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX
Light Coming on the Plains is the name of three watercolor paintings made by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1917. They reflect the evolution of her work towards pure abstraction, and an early American modernist landscape. She began a series of watercolor paintings based upon the scenery and expansive views during her walks, which often included Palo Duro Canyonz
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Additional Links: O'Keeffe Museum
5. Portrait of Georgia O’Keefe, Alfred Stieglitz, American (1864-1946)
Photograph (taken by her photographer husband)
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6. Basen D’argenteuil, 1874, Claude Monet, French, (1840-1926),
Oil paint, Canvas, RISD Museum, RI
An impressionist painting, from a distance of ten feet or so, Monet's brushstrokes blend to yield a convincing view of the Seine and the pleasure boats that drew tourists to Argenteuil. Up close, however, each dab of oil paint is distinct, and the scene dissolves into a mosaic of paint—brilliant, unblended tones of blue, red, green, yellow.
7. Assorted Mobiles and Stabiles, Alexander Calder, American (1898-1976) Sculpture
Calder was born in Philadelphia at the turn of the century. As a young boy, his Dad built him a little workshop where he built toys for his sister and himself. He became a mechanical engineer - turned artist. He produced HUGE mobiles of simple shapes and primary colors, one of which hangs in the modern wing of the Smithsonian. He loves the color red so much "...I want to paint almost everything red !“, said he.
8. LES ASTRES, (The Stars), 1966, Alexander Calder, American (1898-1976) lithographic print, reproduction print
This is a copy of a LITHOGRAPH — a printing process where one chemically changes the surface of a block of limestone, or treated metal plate, to accept ink. When ink is rolled on, it sticks to these ‘ink-loving’ spots. The surface is then run through a large press bed to press the ink onto paper. There is a separate plate and press run for each different color ink to be pressed onto the same sheet of paper when dried from the previous run. These days, artists’ prints are usually processed mechanically, though special print studios do still hand print artists’ works for smaller editions.
9. Ansonia, 1977, Richard Estes ((1932-) Oil on linen, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
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Can you see the bright grays? This painting looks like a photograph. Why? Photographs too, are a medium of artists. Photos capture every detail and although it seems that Richard Estes has also, he actually eliminated and simplified many things in this city scene. We call this king of painting "Super-realism". Why?
Estes has been accepted as a Hyper-, Photo-, New or Super Realist (the names are interchangeable), that is a painter who faithfully records and transmits every detail of the subject observed. It is not an accurate description in his case, for just as an artist like Lichtenstein selected from his source of comic book imagery only what he wanted, so Estes considerably edits what the camera records. He works in a conventional painterly way, arranging his paintings according to traditional canons. And they are paintings: the original photograph is the ‘sketch', and any subsequent photographic blow-up he would consider too blurred for his purposes. On examination, his works prove to be richly painted - the paint being applied with great suavity. His theory that ‘more is less: The more you show the way things look the less you show how they are" is not one that the viewer of his work immediately understands. The smooth Art Deco brilliance of the painting belies the cluttered tatty urban American streetscape that is his subject matter. Estes' comment lies in the creation of an anesthetized sterile world - his comment is his deadpan presentation of the banalities of the common scene.
10. Rebus, 1955, Robert Rauschenburg (1925 – 2008) Mixed Media Collage
This is thrown in for fun. The children can examine it. Do they like it? What MEDIA can they see in this picture? Discuss collage ..... anything they find.