Our last Winter Art Club! L’espace de l’écriture: suggesting the surreal.

Our last ArtClub for the Winter! We were very busy and did two quick projects as well as arranged our work for our show.

For our first project we took our cut pages and painted ANYTHING on them with our transparent watercolour paint. We then glued them to cardstock, added other marks, paint or pen/pencil. Some of you emphasized words on the page, others were inspired by a word or phrase they found, and others ignored the meaning of the words but expressed elements of a story you wanted to tell—i.e Pandora’s box became an abstract painting of translucent red. We signed our work on the front when it was done and displayed them in the stairwell. Pictures to follow shortly.

We also each thought of an object and drew it in a quick sketch. We made some word associations and strung these into descriptive word/sentence-poems. We decided these were "word/sentence-poems" because we were not going to be troubled by correct sentence structure, or even spelling...which means we took poetic license! We redrew our objects very lightly on large paper and drew over our lines with our words and sentences with the goal that every line in the picture was made of words. Your Calligrammes were fun, spontaneous and very inventive.

Both of these projects can be done anytime as a fun exercise for your sketchbooks, and can be done quickly- as we did, or more thoughtfully where you can explore unusual, complex, personal, or direct ideas and relationships between your words and your images.

Thank you for sharing and presenting your work with our guests at our show. You all did a great job! And thank you for a really interesting ArtClub session - all of you made unique and wonderful contributions to our time together and added to the quality of the work we created!

Our next session will start the week of April 10th, 2012. Hope to see you there!

I'm also looking forward to seeing those who are able to come for March Break, starting Monday, March 12th. We're going to have a lot of creative fun!

Sylvie

Winter Art Club Week 5

Great work from excellent efforts!!

Sylvie

Animation and puppy fun!

Try this cel animation fun at The Independent Lens at pbs.org. This section of their site has lots of neat facts and information about the film STILL LIFE WITH ANIMATED DOGS by Paul Fierlinger.

Look at this clever,(vintage) animation by Paul Fierlinger via Sesame Street:

To find out more, see:   http://youtu.be/V2GAPTbEX9E

Winter Art Club Jr. Week 4 Still Life

Great work today!

We worked in our sketchbooks and on a different kind of group painting on paper, on the floor! And you showed great teamwork inventing and mixing 'tangerine'.
We looked at the artist Cezanne, and his work with still-life painting, and learned about mixing paint and colour, and treating our painting tools with care so they can keep on doing their job.
Thanks to all of you for leading the studio today with your many different approaches to thinking about painting as drawing, and still life.
A lot of what we did reminds me of Cezanne's work: He is very well known for his special way of looking at and capturing a moment - and then showing how colour is an integral part of how we each see and understand a form of something in that moment.
I think you all did a great job today investigating Cezanne, colour, painting and capturing your ideas of still-life.
Sylvie

Winter Art Club Week 4 Ink and Paint

This was a very free painting and sharing session. Thanks to everyone for sharing some work they are doing or have done before.
We ran out of time, and ink, outside today(my neighbours said"phew!"). Really neat teamwork on your 'mop' paintings. Oh my, they are good-messy and spontaneous... and THAT is about the BEST part of using Indian Ink to me! They look like 'action', 'darkness' and an 'effort to show "distinct" gesture'. We'll look at them next week and see how they inspire us.
Some of you started a whole new painting on canvas board and/or paper this week too...and some are finished too! Others ran out of time. We will have a little time next week to work back into those if you want to.Thanks F. for the idea to revisit our 'Consequence' pictures(silly creatures) using the face instead - great idea!

So: we have our funny-faces, and a technique for creating random likenesses, skills working with paint and ink, canvas and collage, and some random word selections too. You have also all developed a palette of colours that you each seem to like to work in. Let's bring all these elements together into our studio next week to create a likeness of ourselves. A likeness is something that looks like something, resembles -- but we can take this to mean how each of us see's ourselves at that time, and within an artwork- and that will be our starting point.

Our last Art Club for this session will be on Tuesday, Feb 21st...too soon!! Invite your parents to come early for our art show(5:15) that day, and we'll talk about how we want to hang our work next week.

Keep drawing and writing and sharing,
and thanks for a great job today!

Sylvie

Winter Art Club Week 3 - P.O.V.

We were very busy this studio.

You applied gesso to your canvasses with skill, and patience too as they dried. Your funny faces gave us a great start to talking about exaggerations and even how things actually change in appearance when we change our point of view(how we look at something).

Some very off-the-wall 'What-ifs' from all of you! And some funny word lists too. And I think these two activities really inspired your paintings this week.

Some of you chose to continue on in your investigations and are exploring abstraction and abstract expression with paint--and it is great to see you finding inspiration in each others work and watching how you paint out your ideas and feelings.

Some of you drew characters and tried to resolve something about them through your drawing and painting - which is always exciting to see.

Even those of you who already knew their character before you started to draw, changed them by how you chose to represent them...whether ninja's or a movie robot: these representations share something about you because they came from your hand and share how you were inspired...this too talks about point-of-view!

Great work! We can finish these next week, if you haven't yet, and we'll start our GIANT brush work next time.

Sylvie

Winter Art Club Jr. Week 3 - Patterns

Fun playing today with our puppet show! Lots of dancing, pretending and silly situations for all our dragons, characters and things-on-sticks!
Everyone did a really great job adding to our painting from last week too. Even those of you who weren't feeling quite well made a great effort! The charcoal line drawings you did over our painted background made a very lively art work. You worked out your own themes and inspired each other with: egg shapes, then birds, then dinosaurs with eggs, then moving lines in pathways to birds and eggs... and then canoes(are canoes like half- eggs?)...It makes me think about water, and the big and small things we find in lakes, movement and different surfaces, and also, in a kind of overall way, the idea of water dragons.

Thanks to R. for sharing her paisley-pony today. It gave us great ideas for our drawing patterns and the palette of colours we used to explore them. Exploring patterns was a fun way to try out crayon resist too- that was when we made some lines and patterns in the light coloured crayon, then washed over them gently with our watery paint.

Thanks for a very fun studio!