Well done to everybody on your AMAZING Elmer models last week. They’ll be going into the kiln this week!
This week we have the theme of Henri Matisse and his ‘cut outs.’ Matisse was a French abstract painter, and a very close friend of Pablo Picasso.
Towards the end of his career he developed a ‘new style’, putting away his paint palette and creating what became known as the ‘Matisse cut outs.’ These were exhibited at the Tate Modern in 2014 and I was impressed by the exhibition… immediately thinking “I bet some of our children would create some brilliant Matisse-style cut outs.” We did a fabulous display with the Year 6 class, but that was six years ago so I thought why not have another go!
If you look at the Matisse cut outs you’ll see a distinct style. He used simple, clean shapes of bright colour, often drawing inspiration from the natural world and using plants or ferns (and what I think are ‘seaweed-style’ shapes). Simple geometric shapes and stars/curves etc… also feature. He also created a number of figures in some of his cut outs, many of which were apparently inspired by the circus.
I have recorded a short presentation (10- 12 minutes) to offer a few tips. I think the key tip is to ‘play around with your shapes before you stick them down.’ See how they look when you overlap some of your shapes, think about how one colour might make another stand out. Yellow card on orange may not provide much of a contrast, but against a black, or red, or purple the yellow could really stand out.
This art challenge is all about SHAPE and COLOUR. If you have coloured paper/card at home that’s brilliant, but I’ve created some packs of coloured card that you could pop in and collect from the school office. Use what you need and return what you don’t use. Most of all… HAVE FUN!
