Form in Wire with Claire Falkenstein

blue tape on the left side of the picture has the students name for identification for upcoming art show. 

Discussion: Form

What is form? 

How is it different then a painting?

what is space?

Negative space?

Positive space?

Claire Falkenstein, 

Body Centered Cubic

on display at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA

Claire Falkenstein (1908-1997) 

American artist and sculptor

Through her long and prolific career, Claire explored every medium, from sculpture, drawings and paintings to prints, wallpaper and jewelry. 

An Oregon native who worked in Paris, France, the San Francisco Bay area and Venice, California. 

Falkenstein is best known for her monumental sculptures as well as her more intimately-scaled prints and jewelry. 

Falkenstein experimented endlessly, learning about metals by melting them in spoons over a kitchen stove. 

Soon, she was manipulating gold, silver, platinum, brass, copper and steel into necklaces, brooches, rings as well as large-scale sculpture.

Working in Italy in the late 1950's, she made one of her great discoveries, devising a way to virtually "fuse" glass and metal—two very different materials in behavior and chemistry—into single pieces. 

This combination of materials became the hallmark of her creative production.

While she was working small, Falkenstein was thinking big. 

Gradually abandoning traditional media like wood and clay, she began producing large-scale sculptures, fountains and other structures using innovative glass and metal techniques first explored in her highly experimental jewelry.

SAFETY discussion is necessary for this project. I gave the students 3 feet of wire. If students are too close together someone could get hurt. If you can not spread students out, coil up the wire while children work and remind them at all times to be safe.

Project: create a small wire sculpture with beads

Step1: know that you must be gentle while working with wire

Step2: decide on a shape, our artist used the shape of a square. YOu finished product should be no bigger then your fist

Step3: as you begin to twist and mold your wire into a shape remember your beads 

Step4: add in all beads into your sculpture 

Step5: add in a small colored wire as your last step

Materials:

Beads

Wire 3 feet, Dick Blick wire for students. 

1 Twistezze per child, Dick Blick

Cubist Cityscape with Ethel Pearce Nerger

DISCUSSION: 

Cubism

artist and the artwork: Red Car on view at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA

geometric shape and organic shapes

above art and artist

reducing city scape to geometric shapes, reducing a car to shapes

Artist: Ethel Pearce Nerger 

1901-1985

American Painter

Born on February 16, 1901 in Norfolk, West Virginia, Nerger was one of seven children.

In 1932, they moved to San Francisco. 

She was a prominent West Coast abstract impressionist, 

She was active during the 1940's and 50's in San Francisco art circles. 

Many of the over 200 paintings she produced in her career were sold in that period. 

A member of the San Francisco Women Artists

Her work was also shown in the 1950 New York Metropolitan Museum exhibition, "American Art Today."

Nerger began painting in 1936 and from then on, she once said, "I had no other goal." 

My experimenting has led me to what I call my sublinear paintings, many of which are based on my relationship with my children."

Though Nerger's farm background had family inspired many of her works, her "sublinear" style was at time highly abstract, confusing to some peers and critics while it was likened by others to that of Picasso or Chagall. 

In 1948, she defined her style and philosophy in a submission to a book on California art by Arthur Miller, Los Angeles Times art critic:

I will attempt to explain why I describe my style as sublinear. It is to me similar to a combination of several mathematical equations. The given area is designed by shapes, either solid or by implied line, with the negative (the sub) bearing a very close relationship to the principal shape. This happens throughout my work almost automatically as lines define forms and planes. I use all mediums, but water color is my more natural way of expression.

In 1957, frustrated by the politics of the Bay Area art world, Nerger withdrew, continuing to sculpt and paint, but exhibiting infrequently and refusing to promote her work. 

Nerger exhibited for the final time in 1969. Shortly afterward, 1n 1971, she suffered several strokes and never painted again. She died in 1985.

In June of 2009 two of her oil paintings have been accepted for permanent collection by the prestigious Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento

for additional information: ethelnerger.com/paintings05.html

PROJECT: students use geometric wooden shapes to create cubist style cityscape

Step1: using blocks create a car in the foreground lightly trace the blocks with a pencil once created

Step2: using lines create at least two buildings. Using the wooden blocks add windows, doors and details of a building

Step3: using organic shape create several trees in the middle ground of your piece

Step4: using a series of organic shapes create mountains behind your buildings

Step5: trace all pencils line with Sharpie add a few extra lines in the mountains 

Step6: add in oil pastels of all colors and blue tape

Step7: paint in these different shapes using values of colors. Really think about color choices before applying.

MATERIALS:

Wooden blocks

watercolor paint and paper

pencils

American Impressionist landscape with Birger Sandzen

Discussion: 

Birger Sandzen and the artwork

PINES AND ASPEN, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, COLORADO, 1929, crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA

Impressionism

Pointillism

light values 

stencils

matisse method of painting with scissors for stencils

pollack method of spraying paint (we will use toothbrushes)

Artist: Birger Sandzen  (5 February 1871–19 June 1954), 

he was a Swedish-American painter best known for his landscapes. 

He produced most of his work while working as an art professor at the Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas.[1]

A painter and printmaker, Birger Sandzén was one of the first European-trained, avant-garde artists to settle in the American heartland. 

Born in the village of Blidsberg, Sweden 

Took classes with the internationally known Swedish Impressionist painter and etcher Anders Zorn. 

In 1894, he moved to Paris to attend a painting class by Edmond François Aman-Jean and encountered firsthand the Pointillism of Georges Seurat. 

Sandzén was drawn to Kansas to teach at Bethany College

He immediately assumed a leading role in the cultural life of the Midwest, exerting enormous influence upon the development of art in Kansas and surrounding states. 

He traveled to find his subjects, not just in Kansas but extensively in the desert Southwest and Rocky Mountains of Colorado. 

This painting of Rocky Mountain National Park is a scene that the artist depicted often. 

As in much of Sandzén’s production, the subject matter of rocks, water, and trees is secondary to the artist’s expressive color and application of pigment. 

With thick areas of impasto and brushwork left evident, highkeyed colors exist side by side in full intensity, mixing optically to produce an expressive surface that celebrates both the topography depicted and the art of painting.

For additional information: www.crockerartmuseum.org/art?page=shop.product_details&category_id=43&product_id=596%3D0

PROJECT: students create pointillism landscape using stencils tape resist and toothbrushes

picture landscape in your mind: trees in middle ground, mountains behind, pond in foreground

Step1: in the middle ground draw a rock shape

Step2: in the foreground draw a pond

Step3: using blue tape tear and place in your tree onto your rock in the middle ground

Step4: using poster board cut a mountain range

Step3: place mountain range on to your paper protecting all below

                tape down your painting and the mountain stencil so that they won't move during the 

                splattering

Step4: using a toothbrush and scissors spray in your sky in teh background

Step4: remove mountains paint in mountains and middle ground using the side of your medium brush like oval dots

Step5: paint in your pond using the tip of a q-tip small round dots

Step6: remove your tape from the trees using the side of your small brush add in black side brush ovals creating a birch tree

Step7: using the small point dot of the tip of your paint brush add in the leaves of the tree.

MATERIALS: 

watercolor paper and paints

q-tips

blue tape

poster board

card stock or poster board for mountain stencils

Wet and Dry Watercolor Balance with Paul Jenkins

DISCUSSION: What is balance?

Do you ever spin around in a circle and then try to stand up?

Have you ever pulled on a rope with a friend..as long as your both 

                      pulling it is a fun game

what happens if your friend lets go?

Balance the same or equal on two sides

Show Paul Jenkins symmetrical ex: what do you see?

if we folded it in half would it be the same on both sides?

how did he make this

what colors do you see?

did he mix colors?

Show Paul Jenkins asymmetrical example: what do you see in this picture?

if we folded this pa[er in half would it be the same on both sides?

how did he make this painting

what colors does he show in this work

What do you think about the white in his work? Is it as important as the color?

ARTIST: Paul Jenkins

(1923-    )

American Painter

Born in Kansas City

Jenkins was raised near Youngstown, Ohio. 

Drawn to New York, he became a student of Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League

Ultimately became associated with the Abstract Expressionists

The paintings of Paul Jenkins have come to represent the spirit, vitality, and invention of postWorld War II American abstraction. 

Jenkins's fame much identified with the process of controlled paint-pouring and canvas manipulation 

He is also known for gem-like veils of transparent and translucent color which have characterized his work since the late 1950s.

He was inspired in part by the "cataclysmic challenge of Pollock and the total metaphysical consumption of Mark Toby." 

An ongoing interest in Eastern religions and philosophy and the study of the I Ching.

Jenkins was celebrated as a cornerstone of Post Painterly Abstraction (umbrella term applied by Clement Greenberg to describe the post-Abstract Expressionist approach to painting characterized by "color fields." )

PROJECT: Create balances watercolor work using blue tape

Step1: apply your two pieces of blue tape remembering that will remain white

Step2: on one side of your artwork paint liquid watercolor on dray paper

Step3: On the opposite side> Wet your paper first to and then apply color and see the results

Step4: do not put in morw then two colors on either side as your work will turn brown

Step5: turn in your finished Jenkins inspired watercolor

MATERIALS: 

Watercolor Paper

Blue tape

Liquid watercolors in primary and secondary colors

water

Brushes

additional student examples: