http://www.flagartfoundation.org/exhibition/95/description

Grimanesa Amoros

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/YayoiKusama/ 

Friday August 10th 12-1pm.

This show lasts through Sept. 30th.  

In Art Adventures, we spend a lot of time playing the line and shape game to learn about the fundamentals of art.  We also look at artists who focused heavily on lines and shapes in their art.  One of our favorite of these artists is Josef Albers, best know for his series Homage to the Square in which he explored color theory and relationships through overlapping squares of varying sizes. Therefore, we were very excited to learn about the new exhibition of studies for his paintings at The Morgan Library & Museum!  Despite the fact that Albers usually finished paintings very quickly, he would make an assortment of sketches beforehand, and about 60 of these sketches are now on view at The Morgan.  Since they are sketches, kids will get to see evidence of the artistic process and find inspiration for their own art!

This exhibit will be up until October 14^th so there’s plenty of time to stop by and create your own square story at home! 

For more information and directions, visit The Morgan Library & Museum website.

Photo courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum

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Our 2012 June Art Adventures Summer Camp was a huge success!

For all of our pictures, check out our Flickr Page under “Summer 2012”: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clairescreativeadventures/sets/

Here’s a look at what we did:

 Week 1: 3D Organic Art and the Imagination

 Week 2: Theatrics and Animation

• We began our exploration of theatrics with a look at set props and furniture made by Claes Oldenburg in the 60′s during his “happenings” by cutting, stuffing, and sewing our own soft sculptures. We used vellum to “color mix” as well!
• Then we moved on to mask making, inspired by animals and a discussion on what is abstract? We learned the Decoupage technique when covering the Italian-opera inspired masks with colorful papers, objects and decorating with metallic painted lines we have been studying each day during our abstract line games in our sketchbooks.
• We viewed videos of William Kentridge’s charcoal and torn-paper animations. We took his concept of torn paper characters, created our own and made our very own stop motion animations! We also collaborated on a drawing to “grow” a garden through animation.
• We made our Cindy Sherman-inspired self-portrait designs complete with costumes, props, backgrounds and a photo shoot. We based one of our projects on the multiple actions of the character in motion, in black and white on vellum, relating to our William Kentridge theme and an obscure piece by Cindy Sherman that Claire found at the MoMA exhibit this summer.

Week 3: Color! Line! Shape! Action!

• We began with looking at the monochromatic texture paintings and brushstrokes of Robert Ryman. Then we created our own paintings using egg-whites and flour to paint smooth and textured surfaces of one color of our choice on canvas board. It was the children’s job to decide how to contrast the two and where. Some even hid their name in the shiny texture of the egg white.
• We learned about positive and negative space by taking everyday objects and making molds of them to fill with plaster for our Rachel Whiteread-inspired project and shaping space with Eva Rothschild’s standing installations from Central Park!
• We further explored the line and shape families (a key code to drawing) which we had been studying each day during our abstract line games in our sketchbooks. We created compositions or “stories” of overlapping circles and squares in order of largest to smallest to paint, while looking at many works by Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Ellsworth Kelly and Chuck Close.
• We explored shapes and patterns with bug mobiles! We constructed bugs using wood, fabrics and surprises, adding patterns and creating mobiles out of them which had to be balanced.

Everyday games and happenings…

We played line games in our journals daily using a key for line and shape families- as well as easel painted daily with many artists serving as painting inspiration.

In addition, there was always daily “Free Choice” time where children worked collaboratively at dry art murals, Line Games on Dry erase boards/Chalkboards, or made their own flowers in pots, Eva Rothschild negative space shaping and line/pattern studies, Brice Marden and Terry Winters curved-line yarn rubbings, Marc Chagall-inspired chalk stained glass line and color studies, shape puzzles, famous-artist inspired colorings, colored vellum collages and Rousseau-inspired hidden animal drawings.

Each Friday we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

On our FIRST TOUR of the Met, Art Adventures went to the Contemporary Galleries and saw work by El Anatsui, David Smith, Alexander Calder, and John Chamberlain and created accompanying projects right in the galleries.

On our SECOND TOUR, we explored the work of David Smith, Alexander Calder, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg.

On our THIRD TOUR, we explored “Color, Texture and Line: Why is that Art?” by looking at work by David Smith, Alexander Calder, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Ryman, and Chuck Close. 

EACH WEEK: our tour ended with a lunch and a dodecahedron project on the rooftop to see the Tomás Saraceno installation, Cloud City. Unanimously, our favorite part was that we were encouraged to TOUCH!

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Yesterday we had our Tuesday Art Adventures class in the courtyard of All Souls, and we built awesome Under the Sea Dioramas using floam, shells, waves, and surprises.  We had a great time making ART about NATURE in NATURE!

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Today we wish a happy 75^th birthday to artist David Hockney! 

 Considered by many to be the most influential British artist of the 20^th century, Hockney is a painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer.

 Born July 9, 1937 in Bradford, England, Hockney studied early as a draughtsman and excelled.  While working in England, he focused largely on text and used a graffiti, textural style involving personal subject-matter.  He was part of the British Pop Art movement and further developed that sensibility after moving to Los Angeles in late 1963.  After his move, he changed from oil to acrylic paint and focused on the flat smooth surfaces of paint and vivid colors for which he is most well-known. 

 Not one to work with only one medium and style, he also created a large body of prints.  Working mostly in etchings and lithographs, his prints were often inspired by literature such as Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (1969.) He also worked in set design beginning in 1975, credits including the Metropolitan Opera, New York production of  Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortileges in 1980 and Puccini’s Turandot at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1992.  In the early 1980s, he began to make his photocollages, or “joiners,” from Polaroids and then 35mm film, exploring the concepts of Cubism through photography. 

 Intrigued by innovations in technology, Hockney has consistently played with technology and its involvement with art.  After the introduction of the Brushes app for the iPhone in 2008, Hockney began to use it to create paintings.  In 2011 the Royal Museum of Ontario exhibited 100 of these paintings in David Hockney fresh flowers using iPhones and iPads for the display.

 The exhibition, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, chronicling Hockney’s landscapes for the past 50 years closed in April at the Royal Academy.

 This is only a brief overview of the amazing span of work created by David Hockney, and we encourage you to explore more with these links and join us in wishing this exciting and influential artist a very happy birthday!

 For further information, visit:

David Hockney

Museum of Modern Art

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After viewing many of Cindy’s child- friendly characters on view at MoMA in NYC, studying her process from A- Z, and and choosing props to create their own characters- our summer camp kids show off their unique styles and poses: