This week we have been exploring the artist Vincent Van Gogh.

Through his paintings we learned the phrase ‘self portrait’. This is a painting an artist does of themselves. Jasper said this sounded a bit like a selfie that we take nowadays.

Here are some facts we learned:

• He painted over 900 paintings – Ian
• He became one of the most famous artist – Korin
• He was Dutch but moved to France – Isaac
• No one liked his pictures when he was alive but after he died people really liked them – Joshua
• He did paintings of the flat he lived in – Noah
• He painted with bright colours and sunny colours on a big paintbrush – Becca

Lots of us found out about Vincent Van Gogh’s ear. Nina explained that he had a fight with his friend and chopped his own ear off!

This week we are exploring the Dutch Artist Piet Mondrain. We found out the following interesting facts about Mondrain and had a look a some of his interesting work.

This week really challenged our views on what artist’s works look like. Not all famous art work are paintings or interpretations of objects. In fact not all famous art work even uses paint at all!

• At first Mondrain painted landscapes like Monet. Then he decided he wanted to make pictures his own way and they turned more and more into shapes. – Toby
• Mondrain said if you look at objects and really look you can see them just as shapes. We tried it with things in the classroom and out the window. Trees I thought were more like triangles. – Issac
• Mondrain used yellow, red and blue. We learned these are called Primary Colours. – Becca

Can you try looking at the shapes in objects at home and making your own Mondrain inspired art?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSCmWnIoRpI

In Week 2 of our Artist Study we have been exploring the French artist Claude Monet.  He was a painter who used materials to imply a picture rather than draw it exactly as we would see it.

We discovered these interesting facts about Monet:

• You can tell he was born and lived a long time ago because the photos of him have no colour in them – Jamin
• He liked to paint pictures of nature and not really people. We know these are called landscapes. – Nina
• We draw a picture by colouring in the lines. Monet used lots of little brush marks together to make his picture and no lines. – Zac

Take a look at the paintings we were most inspired by below:

Some of us preferred Monet’s pieces to Kandinsky’s because they were clearly paintings of objects we know. Miss Dunn told us this was because Kandinsky was an Abstract artist.

Try and investigate what this word means at home!

Primary 1 are a class full of budding artists! We have shown a keen interest in art and design this term and as a result we have turned our easel area into an artist exploration area.

Each week we will learn about a new artist and explore using their styles, subjects and techniques at our easel.

Today we learned all about an artist called Kandinsky.

Some of the facts we learned were:

• Kandinsky was born and lived a long time ago – Lucy MacInnes
• Kandinsky was a Russian artist – Phoebe
• Kandinsky was also a musician who made music – Jamin
• Kandinsky used bright colours and shapes to make his pictures – Noah

Some of us liked Kandinsky’s work and some of us did not. We discussed the fact this was OK as we all have our own likes and dislikes.

Check the blog at the end of the week for some examples of our work.