This week we built and painted sculptures that were inspired by Jean Dubuffett. Jean was a french painter that eventually began doing sculpture in a very recognizable black and white. Hopefully after today's lesson, your children will be able to recognize his sculptures that are all over the world and in all the major galleries. They are stunning and so are the sculptures made today!

Jasper Johns

This week we painted numbers, based on the work of American artist Jasper Johns. He is best known for his American flag paintings, but also for selling a piece called 'false Start' for 80 million dollars. We talked about how concepts in painting may be simple and straight forward to be successful. The students played with the primary colors and came up with a composition that simply showed numbers and brush strokes that they liked.

Rene Magritte Sunset Painting

Rene Magritte is well known for his surrealist paintings. More specifically, he is known for putting familiar objects in unfamiliar places. We looked at many of his paintings and talked about the unusual placement of things. He painted on bottles when he couldn't buy canvas. Today there is one of his landscapes painted on a wine bottle for sale for over $700 ,000. We all agreed that if there is no canvas around, we can probably find something that might normally go in the trash, that we could use for a creative backdrop for a new painting!

Scratchboard with Modigliani