The following three activities were the art lessons for Class 3, coinciding with this term's theme 'The Natural World', with a more specific focus on 'Deforestation', that Mrs Seath (our visiting artist) taught us about.
To link in with Class 3's adventure book: 'Journey to The River Sea' by Eva Ibbotson, the children have been looking at creating pieces of Amazon-related art in the style of Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky, who was a famous Russian abstract artist. Discussing the meaning of certain artistic terminology such as composition, palette, geometric, expressive, portrait and landscape, developed our understanding of how we communicate what we see in art. We used his painting 'Squares with Concentric Rings' as our inspiration to construct our own 'Kandinsky style' tree stumps. With the help of Mrs Seath who has come into Burton Salmon this week to work alongside the children with topical art projects, they have made these amazing tree stumps and axes, focussing on the concentric circles technique that Kandinsky used. They primarily used card and paper for these creations, not only developing their dexerity skills in cutting, but this time also learning techniques in constructing a more complex, self-supporting three dimensional structure. The additional axes were made and placed in a split within the tree stumps to exaggerate the message of the dramatic effect deforestation is having on our world.
We also learnt about the life and works of Gustav Klimt, his family background, what inspired his style of work and the meaning of symbolism. 'The Tree of Life' was one of Klimt's most famous works and the image we used as our inspiration, creating our own unique 'Trees of Life'. This learning process not only raised curiosity and enthusiasm about symbolic art, but helped to highlight the importance of trees, their humbling wisdom and beauty and the fact that they do give us life. We discussed the benefits of taking great care (as Klimt did) when creating art and compared the fragility of the paper to that of our forests and natural environments, due to things such as deforestation. The medium we used to create our individual pieces was collage, learning and developing skills in paper quilling. The children carefully selected their colours and designed their compositions, decorating their trees with shiny gold detailing, imitating Klimt's trademark and delivering the message that trees are our treasures.
For Wednesday's lesson, we learnt about Henri Matisse. We looked at Matisse's journey as one of the foremost artists of the Modern Period, from Fauvism to his Nice period and how he came to create his well recognised abstract and colourful collages. As card and paper were the medium of the week for Class 3, we echoed Matisse's leaf designs from his piece 'La Gerbe' to create bright and bold 'natural worlds' of our own, using the spherical form of a balloon and papier mache to hold the shape. Combined, these three creations will form a diverse, challenging and aesthetically pleasing exhibition of the beauty within our natural world and the negative impact deforestation is having on it.
