Warm and Cool Color Seascape with Hans Hoffman

This lesson plan is adapted from and earlier lesson plan: Warm and Cool Colors with Van Gogh

DISCUSSION: 

Hans Hoffman and his work Seascape, 1941

This piece is on display at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA

What do you see in this piece?

Does it look like a photograph

What colors did the artist choose?

what do you see first when you look at this piece?

Landscape: foreground, middle ground, background and horizon line

line

Warm and cool colors

seascapes

Hans Hofmann (March 21, 1880 – February 17, 1966)  

German-born American abstract expressionist painter. 

He was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880 

In 1932 he immigrated to the United States, where he resided until the end of his life.

Hans Hofmann’s paintings bridged the gap between European Modernism at the beginning of the century and Abstract Expressionism a generation later. 

Hired by the University of California at Berkeley in 1930 to teach a series of courses, his curriculum was the most progressive in the state. 

The artist’s combination of Cubist structure and bright Fauvist color, combined with his “push-pull” theories of color and composition, proved revolutionary. 

In California, his views were a decided departure from the way artists were accustomed to thinking and seeing. 

He came to Berkeley through the invitation of Worth Ryder, a former student. In 1932, 

he moved to New York, teaching at the Art Students League and then at his own school. 

In 1958, he retired from teaching to devote full time to painting. 

His late paintings of overlapping squares confirmed his reputation as an internationally important modernist.

Hofmann's work is distinguished by a rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion, and color relationships.

His completely abstract works date from the 1940s.

Hofmann believed that abstract art was a way to get at what was really important. 

He famously stated that "the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak".

PROJECT: students create a warm and color seascape

Step1: students see their vertical page in three parts:background, middle ground, foreground

Step2: Background: using black oil pastel, create a circle sun and a series of vertical stripes

Step3: middle ground: using black oil pastel: students paint in a series of curves that will become mountains

Step4: foreground: using black oil pastel: students draw in a body of water with sail boats

Step5: Background: students color in the stripes in warm colors, orange and yellow using oil pastels

Step6: students color in the middle ground mountains with cool colors of green values in oil pastels

Step7: student color in the sea in values of blue and their sail boats in reds and oranges in oil pastels

Step8: using watercolors paint over the piece with the right colors for each section.

Materials:

12x18 thick white paper

watercolor paint in primary, secondary

oil pastels

black oil pastels