We’re about halfway finished with our study of Matisse, our artist for the term. There’s no real reason why this term is Matisse except that we had an over-sized Matisse art book on hand.  I just randomly choose artists for us to study. And I think that if you’re trying to begin artist study, it doesn’t really matter where you start. Just choose an artist and plunge in. The artist doesn’t have to tie into your history lessons at all.

Sprite has asked me several times why Matisse and Picasso were always painting nudes. So she noticed. Yes, well, I’m not exactly sure myself. (But I ventured a convoluted explanation anyway.) We tend to skip over the nude paintings and sculptures for our daily art narrations. I don’t go so far as to rip out the pages or black them out. We just flip over them and get to a piece that doesn’t cause so much discomfort.

Books

Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors (Smart About Art)

I love, love, love this series of books. They are so interesting and full of graphics.

Henri Matisse art spine

CM said to study one artist per term with one painting every one to two weeks. But we do a painting daily.

Notebooking

Artist biography page from History Scribe.

Activity

Since Matisse did some of his art by cutting out shapes from painted paper, we chose to do a collage style reproduction. To make it really interesting, Sprite chose one of Matisse’s paintings to reproduce from cut out paper shapes.

Sprite’s is the smaller one on the left. Mine is the larger one on the right. It was a really fun activity, and far more challenging that I imagined.

Matisse Reproductions

See how simple artist study is? Actually, you don’t even have to do the notebooking page or the reproduction at all. Just a regular exposure to the artwork of one artist each term is all you need. [By the way, this post compiles many weeks of study, so don't think that we do this kind of in-depth art study daily.]

Related posts:

1. Artist Study Wherever We Go
2. Picasso Artist Study
3. Artist Study– Van Gogh

I’ve found another painless way to inject art into our day. This beautiful 2010 Page a Day Art Gallery Calendar has been sitting on my shelf for a couple of months, just waiting for the new year. And now we can finally use it!

I had read that these calendars sell out every year, and so I bought it plenty early to assure our own set. Sure enough, when I just checked Amazon to share the link with you, the 2010 calendar is already unavailable. (But they’re taking pre-orders for 2011! Talk about faith filled living. I can’t imagine buying next year’s calendar today.)

It’s an eclectic mix of artists — some we’ve studied:

Vermeer & Van Gogh.

And some we’ve never even heard of:

So the calendar is a great way to find new artists to learn about and review art that we should already recognize.

I look forward to recycling the calendar pages for Sprite’s art notebook once we’re past the half year mark. Each sheet is used twice in the year — first the front and then the back.

Just a reminder, this is the time of year (or soon to be) when calendars go on sale. So if you need artist study material, keep your eyes peeled for bargains. A half price wall calendar has super large prints for a fraction of what a coffee table book would cost. And you won’t feel guilty for tearing it apart for an art notebook.

Sprite had complained recently that artist study was getting a bit repetitive. “All we do is look at the painting, and I narrate it. I want to do something different sometimes!”

Hmmm…. good point, Sprite. Simplicity doesn’t have to be boring.

Looking at the Railroad Cards

It just so happens that I had a great resource tucked away for our American history studies –Child-Size Masterpieces – Transportation in America. The book is actually a set of postcard sized art cards  printed on cardstock, meant to be cut apart.

The back of each card has the title of the art, the artist’s name, the date of the painting,  a paragraph or two about painting itself, a bit of information about the artist, and a timeline date of what the painting depicts (often different from the date it was painted).

Showing Off the Backs of the Cards

Using Transportation in America, I added these assignments to Sprite’s schedule. (Of course, at each step, there was plenty of discussion going on about the art and the history portrayed in the art.)

• Day 1 — Take the book apart, and cut out all 40+ cards with the guillotine cutter.
• Day 2 — Without looking at the backs, try to put all of the cards in timeline order. Check the order against the dates on the backs, and fix any mistakes. Stack them in order, and put a rubber band around them.
• Day 3 — Look at all the cards again, and sort them by mode of transportation. Make sets and put them in the clear sleeves. (Affix the tiny art on the front as labels.)
• Day 4 — Let’s talk about the railroad cards.

On Day 4, I asked Sprite to arrange the only the train cards in chronological order.  Then she chose one painting to focus on for narrating back orally. It was wonderful to tie our art into the history we’d been studying. I asked her, “What do you see in the painting that reflects aspects of our history study?” After she shared, I read the back of the card to her. And art study was done for the day.

I think we’ll continue working through the train cards before we move on to another mode of transportation.  It’s not strictly a Charlotte Mason artist study as Miss Mason directed, but I am a firm believer in variety. How do you spice up artist study when it gets a bit dull? Have you ever used any of the Child Sized Masterpieces?

We’re studying Westward Expansion — the Oregon Trail, the Transcontinental Railroad, and the Gold Rush. And for the first time ever, I tied our artist study to our history studies.

And I’m departing from the traditional Charlotte Mason method of one artist per term. Instead, we’re looking at a variety of artists who painted the West.

Our first artist is George Catlin. Our art book had only 10 Catlin works, so it was a quick three week study. (We narrate a piece daily instead of weekly.)

Art Prints Source

The Art of the Golden West (I got mine for $7 at a used book store the last time I was in USA.)

Notebooking

Catlin Notebooking Pages (that I made)

Websites

National Gallery of Art for Kids on Catlin (image rich)

George Catlin and His Indian Gallery (text & image rich)

George Catlin’s Obsession (text rich)

Creative Application

Art Sonia Indian Portrait Create a portrait of a fictional Native American in the style of George Catlin.

Lesson Plans

Campfire Stories with George Catlin

PBS: Images of the West

Today we started artist #2 — Frederic Remington. His art includes sculpture as well, something we don’t often study.

Related posts:

1. Artist Study George Seurat
2. Picasso Artist Study
3. Cassatt Artist Study

Sprite's Sketch of a Kahlo Portrait

Our artist this term has been Frida Kahlo. I wanted a female, non-European, modern artist for something totally different from our other artist studies. Frida Kahlo fit the bill perfectly!

Kahlo and her husband, the famous artist Diego Rivera, were both from Mexico. Her life was filled with pain, both emotional and physical, and her art reflects that clearly. Actually much of her art is not appropriate for children to study. I bought Frida Kahlo 1907-1954: Pain and Passion for our study, and found several paintings that were far too dark for us to use for picture study.

Characteristics of Kahlo Self-Portraits

This is how I handled the situation. First I looked through the entire book to see what sections were particularly disturbing and used paper clips to keep those pages from being viewed. Then I warned Sprite about the gory nature of some of the paintings in our book. I told her she was not forbidden to look, but that I think the images would not be pleasant for her to see. They may even give her nightmares or make her afraid about things that we shouldn’t be afraid of. I let her see a few of the more tame paintings that have the same macabre tone (ones that are not clipped shut but that we won’t choose for picture study) to give her a feel for what I was talking about.

Since we’d already read the Frida Kahlo: The Artist who Painted Herself (in the Smart about Art series), Sprite knew about Kahlo’s sad private life — primarily the fact that she miscarried many times and could never have children due the injuries she received in a bus accident. I told her the basic content of some of the more shocking paintings so she’d know why I didn’t think they were appropriate for her and so that her imagination wouldn’t make it worse than it actually was.  (IE “In some of the paintings, Kahlo paints herself miscarrying her baby.”) She agreed that they would be scary and that she did not want to look at the pages.

Sprite's Self Portrait with Pets

Of course, we discussed how Kahlo must have been in intense pain to create such shocking and personal paintings. It was probably the one outlet for her turmoil. That topic led to another tangent of positive and negative ways to handle the hardships of life.

Besides our daily picture study, I used the NYLearns.org lesson plan –Look and Learn: Self-Portraiture with Pets Inspired by Frida Kahlo. There you can find a worksheet that goes along with this webquest. Sprite enjoyed searching for the answers to the questions online. The culminating activity is to create your own self-portrait with pets. Sprite loved that assignment and added every stray cat in our neighborhood as her “pets.”

cursive copywork

I found a great Kahlo quote for Sprite to use as Cursive Copywork –”I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” And here is a set of Notebooking Pages.

I did find some other Kahlo resources that I bookmarked at Tagfoot in case you want flesh out your own Kahlo study.

Related posts:

1. Artist Study Wherever We Go
2. Vermeer Artist Study
3. Picasso Artist Study

Our artist this term is Vermeer. Since he only left 35 pieces, it’s quite possible to study his entire collection in one term! Interestingly, there is no portrait of this artist and very little is known about his life. But we have his amazing art!

Here is one of Sprite’s versions with the original following.

One day for our daily art narration, we did something different. I gave Sprite an image and asked her to identify all the things in this painting that we have seen in other Vermeer works. You see the same tapestry, window, and chair over and over. It makes this artist study like a scavenger hunt of sorts!  I plan to repeat this activity again later with another painting. (These pages go into Sprite’s art notebook.)

Of course, when you study Vermeer, you’ve got to do your own version of The Girl with the Pearl Earring. And here it is.

I’ve gathered our resources at Vermeer Artist Study, including coloring pages and notebooking pages.

Related posts:

1. Picasso Artist Study
2. Artist Study Wherever We Go
3. Artist Study– Van Gogh

Our latest artist has been Picasso. What a shift from all the Impressionists we’ve studied before! Sprite is enjoying the Cubism a lot, but she dislikes the nude aspects. Since it makes her uncomfortable, we just skip over those or cover the “offending” parts. The book that we are using has a nice variety of his work, so even omitting the troubling paintings leaves us a lot to study.

Here is the work that Sprite chose to draw a version of. I ask her to make her own version because I think that it requires her to study the original very closely.

And we also used some magazine ads to practice making some cubist styled art. First is Sprite’s:

Then mine. This was really fun! We’ll do this again, I’m sure.

For more about the specific books and links we used, see Picasso Artist Study. In addition, there are links to printable coloring pages and notebooking pages specific to Picasso. All of our artist study photos are at Flickr Artist Study Set.

Related posts:

1. Vermeer Artist Study
2. Cassatt Artist Study
3. George Catlin Artist Study

We just completed our artist for this term — Mary Cassatt. As we normally do, Sprite chose one of the paintings to make her own reproduction. This is hers.

Sprite's Rendition

Cassatt's Original

I chose to try my hand at A Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.

My Version of A Little Girl in a Blue Armchair

Original: A Little Girl in a Blue Armchair

And here is Sprite’s notebooking page.

Cassatt Notebooking Page

For a link to this printable notebooking page, details on the books we used, and more Cassatt resources, visit Mary Cassatt Artist Study. And there’s a quiz there. See if you can find the Cassatt among the paintings.

It just so happened that all the artists we’ve studied in depth have been Impressionists (or Post Impressionists). So to make a very welcome shift, we’re moving to Picasso!

Related posts:

1. Picasso Artist Study
2. George Catlin Artist Study
3. Artist Study Wherever We Go

When you’re coming to the end of your artist study of Monet, you can’t pass by a scene like this one without making a reference to the Japanese bridge at Giverny.

I was thrilled when Sprite asked if we could sketch it just like Monet did.

She happened to get a bit sidetracked by some children who kept peering over her shoulder, so she spent most of her time like this.

And here is her finished portrait sketch. I thought it was fabulous! Even more so, I was proud of her attitude. She said as we were walking home that some people said her art was good. Others said it was bad. Some said it was so so. She laughed as she realized that everyone has a different opinion (which they seem to feel so very free to openly express) and that it made no difference to her what they thought. She was drawing for herself, not for them. (As a side note, she is not always so confident. But I was thrilled to hear this from her that day!)

I reminded her that those people more than likely would never risk drawing in public for fear of the kinds of comments she received. But then again, they will never know the joy of relaxing with pencil in hand before a lovely view, the satisfaction of working over a particular curve or line, the joy of being an artist. We are artists if we create art, no matter the results or the opinion of others.

Related posts:

1. Artist Study — Monet

With this blog it’s been feast or famine lately. When I’ve got a chance at the computer, I just go ahead and post a few entries. Maybe it matches your reading habits at this busy time — catching a few moments to read blogs between your Christmas celebrations.

We made a stop at the Birmingham Museum of Art as we were passing through that city. It was well worth stopping and a great break from sitting in the car. Not only was it free to view the permanent collection, but we also saw an original Monet and Cassatt– the next two artists I’ve scheduled to study.

Sprite with a Cassatt

Sprite with a Monet

I was pleased to find that this painting was a study for the final work. It was good to show Sprite an unfinished draft. It made a great reminder that artists are always editing and improving their art. Paintings do not instantly emerge as perfect masterpieces.
Below is the Monet.

Sketching at the Museum

Related posts:

1. Dinosaur Museum