Cezanne still life

Paul Cezanne was a French artist who moved to Paris in 1861. In Paris, Cezanne met many other artists including Picasso. They formed a strong friendship and worked together on some pieces of artwork and shared ideas. Picasso once referred to him as the ‘father of us all’

Cezanne painted a range of different subjects during his career, including: landscapes, still life and portraits. Cezanne painted slowly believing that he needed to truly observe and understand his subject matter before he could capture it with a brushstroke. A painting often took 100 working sessions to complete.

Cezanne would do lots of preparatory drawings before the final piece. He created his works slowly, starting with the outline, and building from there. I set up a still life and using charcoal like cezanne we sketched the outline of the fruit and vase, then using collage we layered up tissue paper, adding the colours, the results were very successful! Well done everyone!

Matisse Cut Outs

Matisse was a French painter who lived in Paris. In 1904 he and his friend Andre Derrain started a movement called Fauvism. The Fauves used bright unrealistic colours in their paintings, and soon Matisse became known for his unusually vivid work.

Matisse continued to paint portraits and landscapes in bright colours but In 1941 Matisse was diagnosed with cancer and had to use a wheel chair, which unearthed a new way of working. Instead of working on canvas with paint Matisse began to ‘paint with scissors’. We discussed what this could mean, and looked at a few of his pieces.

Matisse made his cut outs very large and continued to use the bright primary colours he liked using in his paintings. He would cut shapes out and stick them to his walls making ‘a garden… of leaves, fruits and birds’.

Taking inspiration from Matisse’s ‘Parakeet and the Mermaid’ and ‘Icarus’ we made our own cut outs!

Kandinsky Inspired Felt Making

This week we looked at  the influencial Russian painter Kandinsky. Kandinsky was the first painter to make purely abstract work. We looked at some of his paintings and discussed the word ABSTRACT.

 

 

Kandinsky was also a talented musician and music became a large part of his artwork. Kandinsky had a special ability called Synaesthesia, this gift gave him the ability to hear colours and see sounds! So he would often paint whilst listening to music. Kandinsky also used colour to describe how he was feeling. This can be seen in one of his most famous paintings, the concentric circles.

Using Kandinsky’s circler shapes as reference we then made our own oil pastel sketches of the colours that we were feeling at the time. We then began to translate our circles with the wool. We dicussed where the wool had come from and how it had been treated (combed and dyed). Legend has it the first people to learn about felting were the Nomadic people, they once stuffed their boots full of wool to keep them warm before a long journey and when they arrived at their destination found that they had made socks! This was due to the friction of walking and the moisture of sweat. These are the two things needed to felt wool, friction and moisture.

 

The felted circles came togther to create our own Kandinksy inspired piece! Well done guys! Great job!

 

Newlyn Artists

This week at art club we looked at some famous Cornish Artist, more specifically The Newlyn School of Art.

• The ‘Newlyn School’ was a group of artists, based in this small Cornish fishing village in the late 19th century,
• They had a similar painting style and shared subject matter – capturing the real lives of the fishing and farming communities in this remote part of Britain.
• Between 1880 and 1900, over 130 artists spent time working in this small fishing village, the most famous of whom is Stanhope Forbes, often called ‘the father of the Newlyn School’.
• The artist we’re big fans of, and very influenced by the Impressionist artists like Claude Monet (The style is called impressionism because artists were not trying to make a highly realistic painting)
• The Newlyn artists used many short brush strokes, applying paint thickly, to create the idea, or impression, of a subject.

We learnt the word IMPASTO which laying on paint or thickly so that it stands out from a surface, The Newlyn artists would often do this dso as they could work quickly.
Another important fact about these artists is that they painted ‘en plein air’ meaning in the open air, painting directly from nature. Artists would even turn boats into floating studios from where they could paint fishermen at work.

The groups challenge this week was to transcribe one of the Newlyn artists paintings. We were very impressed with how everyone embraced the short thick brushmarks and working fast colour mixing on the paper.
We saw some incredible work this week of an extremely high standard. Well done everybody!

 

Circus Impressions

This week at art club was circus-tastic! We were inspired by the vivid impressionist illustrations of Henri De Toulouse – Lautrec.

Tolouse Lautrec was born in France into an aristocratic family, he became one of the most famous impressionist artists. He lived in Montmartre, an area of Paris famous for its many artists, writers, and performers. These people became the subjects of many of his works of art. He became well-known for capturing performers in their working environment and bustling crowd scenes.

We looked at the way Lautrec painted in flat, simple areas of colour with strong outlines. We noticed he often used garish and artificial colours, bright orange hair and electric green backdrops were popular themes in his portraits and posters

 

As well as dancers who performed at the world famous cabaret The Moulin Rouge Toulouse Lautrec also had a passion for the circus. He created many circus themed illustrations for French magazines.

The group’s challenge this week was to create their own circus illustration based on vintage photographs of trapeze artists, strong-men, clowns and uni-cyclists. We drew out the acrobats carefully using the grid technique and then added vivid colours and impressionist marks with chalk pastels.
The results were simply fantastic and we were very impressed with the high standard of drawing skills displayed by all groups!

Our Arts Academy took the workshop a step further by contextualizing their drawings, adding hand-drawn text to transform it it into a circus poster.
Well done everybody terrific job!

 

Fauvist Falmouth

This week we looked at the work of french artist Andre Derain. Derain was very good friends with Henri Matisse, and in 1904 they both took a trip to the Mediterranean. This trip inspired new work and in turn a new art movement which was later called Fauvism.

Fauvism or ‘le fauve’ means ‘wild beasts’ when translated to English, so I asked the children why they thought this was. We looked at a selection of paintings that they made and we discussed what was similar about them all.

 

We noticed that the fauves or ‘wild beasts’ used bright, vibrant and unrealistic colours in their paintings with short WILD brush work. The colours used are exaggerated and unnatural.

We then studied an image of a Cornish fishing boat and the surrounding landscape and using watercolour and acrylic we painted like WILD BEASTS!

We made a wash of colour with the watercolours and then added short brush strokes with acrylic paint and cotton buds!

We think the standard this week was superb! Well done guys!

 

The arts academy took fauvism to another level, they’re drawings and bright vivid colours really stood out!

We will see you next week for circus chalk drawings!

Truro Arts Academy Branding

Last week our Truro Arts Academy members had the very important task of branding this brand new club. We decided that versatility, relevance, memorability and uniqueness are key aspects to creating a great logo. After coming up with a range of design ideas our academy members created a final design using coloured card. We have taken from all of these and created these three final designs.

We would really appreciate your opinion on the strongest design which we will develop further.

 

1. Palette Design

 

2. Paint Design

 

 

 

3. Easel Design

WELCOME TO THE AUTUMN TERM

The Autumn term of Truro Art Club kicked off this week. It was great to welcome back members from last term but also meet some brand new faces. On top of that we also launched our brand new group for older children Truro Arts Academy!

We’ll be creating a new masterpiece each week right up until Christmas. We have so many exciting workshops planned this term exploring sculpture, painting, printmaking, drawing, model making.

We kicked off our first session with a fun ice breaker game and then handed out the exciting schedule of workshops ahead of us. Please note the schedule has a list at the side what to bring for each session. We also gave out the much anticipated goodie bags to new members.

Our first lesson was all about the famous artists that the groups are named after.
The Marvellous Monets learnt all about how to create impressionist brushmarks like Claude Monet. Impressionist painters used many short brush strokes, applying paint thickly, to create the idea, or impression, of a subject. If you stand very close to an impressionist painting, often the painting won’t look like anything but a bunch of paint blobs. When you back away from it, though, you can see the whole picture. The Marvelous Monet’s worked together to recreate one of Claude Monets famous garden paintings, each recreating a small section of the masterpiece.

The Perfect Picassos a portrait sculpture inspired by cubist mastermind Pablo Picasso! We learnt that The cubists wanted to show all the sides of an object in the same picture.  Some cubist works were extremely abstract. In Picasso’s The Guitar Player for example it is difficult to see the person in the painting. Picassos sculptures showed instruments from many different angles. The group noticed Picassos collages looked like they had exploded into sharp pieces and then stuck back down.

Finally our Truro Arts Academy members had the very important task of branding this brand new club. We decided that versatility, relevance, memorability and uniqueness are key aspects to creating a great logo. After coming up with a range of design ideas our academy members created a final design using coloured card. We were so impressed with the originality and strength of ideas. We look forward to showing the final designs to the owner of the company who will decide which design to develop further.

We’d like to say a big well done to everybody. We hope you enjoyed the first session as much as we did and we look forward to watercolor painting with you all next week!

truro arts academy

This term we have launched a brand new club which will run on Friday after- school. This new workshop programme has been devised exclusively for older children aged between 10 and 13.  This high quality programme offers art instruction that goes far beyond arts and craft. The curriculum is varied andemphasis is put onclassical principals of creating art including still life, the figure, landscape, portraiture, clay sculpture and more.

Our workshop leaders are both professional artists and CRB checked. They will help students achieve their full artistic potential in a friendly and encouraging class atmosphere. All skill levels are welcome as students will receive individual attention geared towards their own strengths and weaknesses. Throughout the term students will create a body of work can be kept and incorporated in their school portfolio

Autumn Term Dates

PLEASE BE AWARE THE TERM DATES HAVE CHANGED FROM PREVIOUSLY ADVERTISED.