Big Bold Beautiful! The Art of Lois Mailou Jones

Big Bold Beautiful

The Art of Lois Mailou Jones

Greer Geckos are learning about African American artists such as Lois Mailou Jones.  She was an American painter who first achieved acclaim during the Harlem Renaissance Era but her works gained popularity for decades later. Her work shows influences of African forms such as traditional African masks and her love of bold colors, textiles and patterns. Our assignment here was to look at two of her works and let them inspire us to use Big Bold Forms and colors to create beautiful works of art.

Can you see our influences? 

Les Fetiches

Examples of her bold use of pattern and color !!!

Some examples of 3rd grade student work!!

Flip Books

Flip Books

Here in the Greer Art Room, we are building on previous work with Thaumatropes and early animation to begin working on Flip Books. Yeah!  The hardest part in this process is seeing the forest through the trees. The concept of having 20 or more pages of art work to create was a deterrent to many but seeing the final product of others helped to keep them pressing on.
 The Pinterest Lesson Pages Automata-Kinetic-Art-Cool-Animation Pinterest Page have been  has been so much fun to explore. Nothing beats a visual description of what an actual flip book is and how to make it. As our final products have been assembled and stapled. We are now beginning to use awesome stop animation programs out there to have an alternative way to "animate" our flip books. So we are seeing the "flip" by hand and captured cyberspace on Youtube! Who wouldn't want their work to live forever. :)  Happy Flipping!

Thaumatropes & Pinterest

 For those of you who don't know me...I incorporate the site Pinterest in different ways while teaching art with my elementary students. I am such a visual person! What I share with students, in part, are examples of the work of many "anchor" artists i.e. the masters, along with real world examples of influences by that artist, time periods, themes, cultural ties, musical connections filled with sounds. Sure,  I could do a powerpoint but what's the fun of that anymore. Especially when you automatically have that same page available to share with followers including students and their families. So... the page I have for each lesson, is displayed on an interactive whiteboard at the beginning of class.
 that I am teaching filled with visual examples to coincide with our lesson of the day/week/semester.

Toy Kinetoscope made famous by Edison

Thaumatropes-My Pinterest Lesson Page  Last week I spent some setting the stage for a unit I am doing with students on animation. They are loving it!
 We talked about Thomas Edison and Kinetoscopes.
 I bought a book from B&N which included the tools to make a do it yourself Kinetoscope. This served to be an outstanding example of how an old school movie reels work. I also showed them a Chuck Close flip book purchased from my summer trip to the Smithsonian. This really helped to make it hit home. Now on to Thaumatropes. Hillarious hearing children say that word 3 times. Ha ha ha!!
Thaumatropes are old school animation toys made popular in the late 19th century with a basic concept. ...a picture on one side and an adjacent picture on the other. Animate the picture by adding the hand movement of rolling the device quickly. Attached are two examples from students in my classes. Fun fun fun! Now....onto Flip books...stay tuned!

Elizabeth Catlett-Study in Line and Strength

As a student at the University of Virginia, I studied studio art with passion. It is so cool to figure out what is your thing and embrace it. But while there I also caught the art history bug. I studied a course under a fabulous visiting professor by the name of Dr. Judith Wilson and was awestruck! We surveyed, reviewed and analyzed African American history, culture and its pertinence to the Arts in the United States. I had not realized up until that point how important it was to bridge who you are, who you have been as a people with what you can do creatively as an individual. I was mesmerized each and every class. So I double majored in Studio Art and Art History. Through the years, I have never forgotten those experiences.

As I became an elementary art teacher, I wanted to make sure that I fueled that knowledge with what I brought to the students that were in my charge. But...not just for the sake of African-Americans and the art that we do, but for art that honors people and cultures the world over.

With that being said, when you teach the visual arts...you still have to teach the fundamentals. And make no mistake, it is an absolute joy to teach the fundamentals. I am going through the elements of art right now, with color and shape and line, etc. This foundational step gives wings to some more in depth lessons we get into next quarter. To review line as an element,  I'd like to do is revisit a line and printmaking lesson that I took on my first two years of teaching that was pretty successful.

Elizabeth Catlett, was by far one of my favorite artists. I wanted to make sure I did a project featuring her this year, given that she passed away April, 2012. Elizabeth Catlett Article  She was a genius in my opinion in communicating images of women with strength and integrity while giving honor to their position no matter how small it may have been viewed by the world.

"Sharecropper, 1970" featured here is an image that I shared with my elementary students.
It gave us an opportunity to talk about some important key elements:
personal past experiences, social histories, wealth, class and economy,
cross curricular connections to the civil rights era
We identified who the woman is in the picture and the design characteristics of the image and how Catlett use line as a design tool  to communicate her ideas about who this woman was so successfully in this print.
Art Activity We studied different types of lines-diagonal, straight, curvy, wavy, thick, thin, etc.
 and practiced making self portraits or portraits of family members being inspired by the design elements of our anchor image from Elizabeth Catlett.  So stay tuned for new examples of creations from students in the next month or so.