During this messy class, students were challenged to combine, arrange and overlap shapes to create abstract compositions.  Matisse’s gouaches découpés inspired us to cut out shapes, using the negative and positive space as a stencil for a unique abstract pattern in tempera paint!   [[posterous-content:pid___0]]

This Saturday we will continue to think about the artwork we saw at the Whitney Museum and examine about how David Smith combined geometric shapes to create his sculptures. We will explore how lines and shapes interact, how to create balance, and how to use analogous colors to create a pleasing composition in our our …

Drawing inspiration from our museum trip to the Met we will reexamine our self portraits and explore how to make them abstract. We’ll look at Picasso’s Dora Maar, with the exaggerated shapes and colors and Romare Bearden’s, One Night Stand, to see the divided and mixed up portions of faces to get ideas for our …

A great exhibition for you and your children to see together is David Smith @ the Whitney on Madison Avenue. Some of our program’s children and their parents went and thoroughly enjoyed seeing how he transforms 2D thoughts in sketchbooks, collages and small paintings into so many large scale 3D metal sculptures!