Art Blog April 2014

Thank you to all of you who came to visit "The Bacich Box Show" on April 10. The show was a huge success! Thank you to all 1st-4th grade art docents for doing an amazing job informing our guests, and representing your grade levels. 

During the month of April the Kindergarten through 4th grade students have worked on the following art projects:

Kindergarten Flower Vase Still-Life

3rd grade Navajo Sand Paintings

Kindergarten:    Oil Pastel Flower Vase Still-Life

There are crayons... and then there are pastels! In this project, the students were introduced to the photorealist Ben Schonzeit. Students practiced flower drawing techniques. While depicting the flowers and vases on a large scale, the students also picked up basic oil pastel skills - learning how to blend by layering the intense, mixable pastel colors, shading to achieve light and dark,and using their fingers as a tool. A layered, three-dimensional effect was also achieved with the addition of hand made paper petals.

Oil pastels were created in 1920 in Japan as a means of introducing Western art education to children. While not a fine arts medium when it was first produced, it was an immediate commercial success and soon after, artists such as Picasso began using oil pastels as a recognized art medium.

please see examples of student work above

1st GRADE:               Royal Self Portrait

In connection with the first grade core Language Arts “Fairy Tale” studies, students sketched a large sized “Royal Self-Portrait”. Students were encouraged to use their imagination and visualize what it would be like if they were “King or Queen.” Students painted the large self portraits  with tempera paints. To make the “royal look” perfect, gold and silver paints were applied to the King’s and Queen’s crowns by the artists. 

2nd GRADE:          Spring Chickens

The spring chicken art project correlates with the second grade social studies “Farm Unit,” as well as with Mrs. Libby’s upbringing on a farm in Switzerland. Students learned to use geometric shapes to sketch hens, roosters and little chicks. Students had a choice to enlarge a hen or a rooster onto a 9”x12” paper. In order to create a “feather like texture”, students used white paint and different colored tissue paper to turn their drawings into a barnyard regular.

3rd GRADE:     Navajo Sand Painting

In connection with the 3rd grade social studies curriculum, third grade students studied the unique Native American art for of the Navajo tribe. Sand painting is the art of pouring colored sands, powdered pigments from minerals or crystals onto a surface to make a fixed, or unfixed sand painting. Unfixed sand paintings have a long established cultural history in numerous social groupings around the globe, and are often temporary, ritual paintings prepared for healing ceremonies.

Students worked with traditional Navajo icons and symbols to created a fixed sand painting on a sand paper surface. Students took great care in painting the Native American images honoring the Navajo color palette. 

please see examples of student work above

4th GRADE:     California Watercolor Books

This lesson connects with the 4th grade studies on California. The 4th grade students were introduced to four different watercolor techniques. Students experimented with the wet-in-wet, glazing, dry brush, and printing with cardboard techniques. Students created an accordion fold book out of watercolor paper and practiced each technique on one page of the book. Students worked with simple bookbinding techniques to create a frond and back cover for their books. On the back side of the accordion book, students painted a California landscape representing one of the four California regions (coast, mountains,desert, central valley). Students applied the watercolor techniques to the landscape. As a finishing touch students wrote a thoughtful quote in their book. The quote informs the viewer about an idea, emotion, or connection to the landscape that cannot be seen. 

The Bacich Box Art Show

Please join us for the grand opening of 

The Bacich Box Art Show 

Open House: April 10, 2014 6:00-7:30 

The Bacich Box Show

Kindergarten -4^th grade

The Bacich Box Show Installation is based on the “Pt. Reyes Box Show”, an annual art event organized as a fundraiser for the Art Gallery Route One in Pt.Reyes. Wooden boxes are altered and decorated by local artists and auctioned off at the closing of the event.  Our large size school community of 704 students lends itself well to create a powerful visual installation by creating our very own “Box Show”.

For the Bacich Box Show students had the opportunity to alter a cardboard tissue box into an exquisite piece of art. A contemporary artist was assigned to each grade level, (please see below).  Students were guided to use the tissue box as a building block to create sculptures based on the assigned artist's work. 

Artist Theme and Concept:

4th grade: Henry Moore, wire coat hanger semi-abstract sculpture

3rd grade: Louise Nevelson, wood assemblage shadow box

2nd grade: Friedensreich Hundertwasser, “Kunterbunt” buildings

1st grade: Nava Lubelski, recycled rolled paper shadow box 

TK and K: Wassily Kandinsky, concentric circle box 

4^th grade: Henri Moore, wire coat hanger semi-abstract sculpture

Henri Moore, English sculptor and artist (1898-1986). He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures, which are located around the world as public works of art. His shapes are usually abstractions of eroded bones, stones, and sometimes human shapes. The process of his large-scale sculptures always started with several loose sketches, transforming the sketches into small Maquettes, and lastly enlarging the finalized shapes into the end product.

Students were introduced to working in a similar way. Sketching loose, soft forms around the straight lines and right angles of a square or rectangle. The curvy forms of the sketches were used as inspiration to alter the tissue box. Students used a wire coat hanger to curve around and pinch the box. A Nylon knee-high was stretched over the structure to enclose the shape. Students carefully applied two coats of white acrylic gesso paint to turn the sculpture into a solid, semi-abstract sculpture.

3rd grade: Louise Nevelson, wood assemblage shadow box

Louise Nevelson (1899 –1988) was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall assemblage pieces and outdoor sculptures. Usually created out of scrap wood, her sculptures appear puzzle-like, with multiple intricately cut pieces placed into wall sculptures or independently standing pieces. A unique feature of her work is that her figures are often painted in monochromatic black, white, or gold.

Students altered the opening of the tissue boxes and used the depth of the box to create an interesting, balanced assemblage using wood scraps, corks, and egg cartons.  Students painted their wall sculptures based on Nevelson’s color scheme.

2nd grade: Friedensreich Hundertwasser, “Kunterbunt” buildings

Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Austrian artist/architect (1928-2000) who later took New Zealand citizenship, became best known for his environmentalism, philosophy, and design of façade, postage stamps, flags, and clothing. The common themes in his work are bright colors, organic forms, reconciliations of humans with nature, and a strong individualism, rejecting straight lines. He describes his work as “Kunterbunt” German for higgledy-piggledy, multi-colored, jumbled up.

Students designed personalized façades using the opening of the tissue box as a window. Hundertwasser’s idea was that everyone should have a “window right”, meaning that you should be allowed to design the area around your window where you live. Students decorated and individualized their window and living spaces in a collage technique. The façades boxes stacked together create a display of a “Kunterbunt” community.

1st grade: Nava Lubelski, recycled rolled paper shadow box 

Nava Lubelski born in New York 1968, a contemporary artist, is known for a series of flattened sculptures made from shredded and cut paper. Lubelski likes to use recycled papers. One of her pieces titled “Tax Files” depicts an organic shape of a tree configured out of a mass of rolled up deposit slips, pay stubs, receipts and tax forms.

Students painted their tissue boxes in neutral shades of black, gray and brown. The paper recycle bin in the art room became the student’s material resource. Students created a great variety of paper rolls. The paper rolls were glued to the inside and outside of the boxes to create a shadowbox effect.

TK and K: Wassily Kandinsky, concentric circle box 

Wassily Kandinsky, Russian painter and art theorist (1866-1944), is credited with painting the first purely abstract works.

Students were introduced to Kandinsky’s painting “Squares with Concentric Circles”. Concentric circles, arcs or other shapes are shapest that share the same center. Students created concentric paper circles and glued them on a paper cone. The cone was adhered to the inside of the square tissue box to mimic the affect of Kandinsky’s painting. Students decorated the outside of the box with colorful art tissue paper.