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!

Winter Art Club Jr. Week 2

Thank you for your drawing and crafting today. You did a lot of work in a short time and found a fun way to share your work with each other in your puppet play-&-dance party.

You all created very lively, and varied works around our Lunar New Year theme. We had some free drawing time, then started right into constructing our fans, dragon/creature puppets and masks. You each made different choices in your approach to our project, and made great selections of materials, techniques and templates to work from.

Most of you also had time to help create the group painting. Since some of you didn't get a chance, for whatever reason, we will leave it up to work on next time, with different materials for you to use. It will be exciting to see what you come up with.

We will, of course, also do a new group paint since we love to paint.

Next Wednesday, we will first start with the rest of our puppet play & dance, and see what else that will inspire us to draw and make.

Thank you for your awesome efforts!
Sylvie

Winter Art Club Week 2

Thank you for an inspired session.

We talked about Lunar New Year this week and looked at some drawings of dragons as well as images of dragon kites flying through the sky.

This is the year of the water dragon for Chinese New Year.

We looked at work by artist Yue Minjun and we talked a little bit about the differences between cultural and religious celebrations.

You did a great job with your blind contour drawings.

Your paintings give us a range of collaborative efforts to look into. And they seem to reflect our discussion earlier: they are quite abstract and there is a real feel of festival; dimension and space; and flying and dancing colours. There are really interesting positive and negative spaces created between the paper and paint as well. We can talk and think more about these ideas, and how the images inspired us, next time.
This Tuesday, we will work more on exaggeration and gesture as we start our canvasses - I'll have your funny faces for you too! We will also work on some of our writing next studio.
Have a great week!
Sylvie

Our First Winter Wednesday Art Club Jr.

We're a talented new group with a lot of energy and ideas.

Our first group painting was well negotiated, and worth those efforts. Thank you all for working so well together. It is interesting to me how the lines and the colours play together, and how it seems very balanced with no area asking for more attention that another area - except maybe the blue line at the top...and then that unpainted space attached to it above. It might seem to frame the work, kind of like that space at the top wants to be the boss and only watch the fun...but then those cloud shapes just hang on there, talking to the line, to keep it all part of the group.

I was impressed with how well you copied my patterns into your sketchbooks. I gave you some complicated challenges.. but you did a really great job with them! You're already very good at drawing what you see.

We talked about the artist Matisse, and about collage and negative space, as we tried our own mixed-media explorations... with exciting and unique results.

We'll use some of these ideas again next week, and invent some of our own techniques, to make masks and puppets.

pictures to follow soon!

Sylvie

Our First Winter Tuesday Art Club

It was great to see everyone, and to work with our new group.

We did some interesting contour drawings as we warmed up - these are also mini still-life drawings which you can set up for yourself anytime and anywhere.

We also created some silly character's in our group and then you did some very individual works exploring ink, charcoal pastel, smudging and ways of looking at the elements of a whole. Thank you all for bringing your enthusiasm, and great ideas, to our first studio.

Next week, you can work from the character you started this week(or create a new one), using paint and text. In this case, text means words that you visually incorporate into your work. We will be exploring exaggeration through words, and using both images and text.

Please try to find time to draw or write in your sketchbooks everyday. And it doesn't matter what so much as that you get something down.. just a few minutes is fine.

Something to think about:
Whats and Thats start to work together the more you practice...what's a what and what's a that?
If you like, you can show and tell us your thoughts about this next studio.

Thanks again for your efforts!
Sylvie
(pictures to follow soon)

Our last Tuesday Art Club for this Session!

Your portal improvisations were brilliant, creative, well-spun and on the spot. We can spin a tale on the fly, or with short notice, or spin it through much reflection, carefully developed over time - I can't really say either way is better, just different ways to different kinds of stories.

Incorporating portal technologies into our work today was very exciting, traveling to ancient shrines in ink, or duplicating and painting on a drawing to express the experience of it-great ideas and work! Using 3-D objects (found objects like the ear bud portal, or natural elements, or made objects like a ratatouille recipe or a translucent overlay) gives layers to how we can relate to your stories, as does the way you collaged your own work back into your pages. That is like traveling back and forth through time because we are revisiting our old work while creating new work.

You are all very good at playing off you own and each others ideas, and attentively incorporate these into your own work or into collaborations. It's really great to see how you share while giving and receiving proper credit - it acknowledges we are having a conversation with each others ideas - through our work. So props to all of you.

Leave your books around where you can see them...and work on them again if you want to - you'll know when they're finished - and let them inspire other ideas for you! Some of the things you have already done that you can use to help you finish, or start something else, include: adding or repeating elements of content including layout elements; different uses of medium and style for effect; working in wordless, text-only and combined formats of representation and using all of these to start stories; working with collage, ink, drawing, painting, photos and scans; as well as shifts/contrasts in scale, colour, style and media...

Carry on then...and if you are newly joining us, or returning next session, you're welcome to briefly present something, that you've created, to the group at our first meet up on January 17th.

Happy Holidays!
Sylvie

Art Club Jr. Week 5 - Mobility

Wow! You all did such good work, in such a short time, with such unique results!

We will have time next week to add finishing touches to our mobiles and to set up for our art exhibition. We will show our parents and friends all our work and also get a chance to talk about what we've made, and what we like about each others work, over some treats.

Thank you so much for power-house glueing, taping, drawing, assembling and for the very dark and sparkling painting of a buried, layered rainbow tree man and hidden numbers...Great team work!...

I'm actually wondering if it will ever dry :)

I'll take a picture of your painting in the daylight tomorrow, and post it then:
Sylvie

More links

As requested from jr's. and sr's. some arts and culture fun links:

Art Club Week 5

Lots of great sharing of our ideas, and working, during studio. Awesome!

You've all presented fun, interesting, and different, approaches to telling stories through words and pictures and it's exciting to see your choices. I really enjoy the elements of humour and science fiction that keep coming up in our stories and our notions. You are all successful at finding artistic challenges in what you are doing, which is really helping you to move forward with your work.

Let's see how much of our books we can finish next class. We are still thinking about eventually sharing editions of a finished work with each other.

We discussed portals again...they seem to be our theme for this session...ways to transport between two places, or times, or... ways of saying something? How might a book, or a comic-book, be like a portal?

Next week is our last session until after the Holidays. Please bring your books to finish. Also bring something more to share about your own portal ideas - you've all got great designs.

Here's a challenge: Explain your portal picture by answering the following three questions: 'How does it work?', ' Where does it take us from, and where can it take us to?' and finally 'What do we see during transport?'...and you can refer to Dr. Who, Star Wars and even Santa Claus, if you like, but use your imagination to try to see your own vision of the answers to these.

Sylvie

Art Club Jr. Week 4 - Surfaces

Thank you again for all your efforts this studio.

We worked on a new painting that let you each work both independently and collectively. It's interesting how you each made marks on your masks in different styles and mediums...with very different and personal results. This is an interesting group work that is made of multiples of the same idea: a face.

We had a drawing fort this week, and took turns working in that space. This resulted in a lot of interesting, and silly, conversations as we worked.

We coloured, decorated and created more animals from our print-outs using paint and markers. Next week we will do more explorations with them, painting some more, tracing them, making silhouettes, and embellishing. We will also work on our cutting and gluing.
You all did a great job learning new skills: using sandpaper, and painting on challenging shapes - in this case our sticks! Sometimes we want to smooth things before we paint them...it makes a new surface for the paint to stick. We don't have to, but the sticks we had got so nice and smooth, it was a fun exercise. We'll continue to work on our sticks next time too.

Have a great week! And remember our last studio is on Friday, Dec.16th, not Thursday...we changed the date so we are not so rushed. This will be our art exhibition and our parents and friends can have time to look at all our work.

Sylvie