Artist of the Month - September

I seem to have had a run of interesting and intriguing female artists and this month was going to be another one that I discovered whilst back in the UK. But then since I showed my dad my last painting weve had a back and forth text conversation about the artist that my latest work reminded him of.

 

So why not...this month's artist is Roger Dean. And he's from my home county of Kent!

On first glance, he really isn't an artist that would appeal to me. I asked my Dad if he would have his work on his wall...maybe back in the day but not now. As I've looked at his work more I am drawn more to it and notice more detail each time and I'm realising that is a basis for having a piece of art on display. He's definitely going to be an inspiration but his technique I can only dream of!

Dean was born in Ashford in Kent but travelled well as a child being the son of an British Army engineer father. He came back to England in the late '50s and went to the Canterbury College of Art. He is actually a silversmith and furniture designer by trade with architecture being part of his CV as well. However, he became a much respected and reknowned rock artist in the 1960s. He has designed many album covers for the likes of Yes and Asia and has published books of his work. He became known for the distinctive bubble style that he designed for Yes' album Close to the Edge...

...it's this album that my painting reminded my Dad of:

 

He is otherwise known for the fantasy scenes he paints, the almost sci-fi scenes but he sees himself as more of a landscape painter than a fantasy artist. Arches, floating islands, sweeping and swirling paths are all features of these organic dreamy landscapes. He mostly works in watercolour, but many of his paintings have mixed media including gouache, ink, enamel, crayon and collage.

His website is rogerdean.com (althought they are currently having server probs) and his Facebook page is 

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Roger-Dean-Official-Page/267978434150?fref=ts

 

Enjoy x

A look at other Art Bloggers

I've just taken a look through my blogs in my reading list...I usually head straight to Cassie Stephens...she makes me giggle...and she has this awesome guitar apron that I WANT!! However, today Olive at Olive ART caught my eye again as she hit on a subject that's at the back of my mind for the year coming up.

I think I focus on it already but I really want the children to start to automatically offer an opinion on a piece of famous art or even an artist's style. I know I encourage discussion and opinion in a structured format that leads into the lesson but would like to find another way that tells them it's OK to ask a question or offer a thought at any time. So I liked this idea from Olive and also this one too that makes up more of a lesson.

Olive ART! Do You???: Looking at Art: She has a bulldog clip with her chosen painting and her bubble whiteboard next to it with some magnetic words. And this allows the children to choose their word that they associate with the picture, whether it is something they see or something that they feel or even the mood of the painting. Whichever it may be, as she says, it encourages the children to learn to 'see' more in art.

Her other recent development I like would to see how she gets on with, has the pupil discussing the quote and the piece of art, do they like or connect with the painting, do they agree or disagree with the artist's quote, and the children concluding from this what it is to make art...it's not just about paint and pencils and making marks. I'd like to do this with my year 6s.

I would have activities like this in an area every week and for every year in which they could discuss, describe, think about a piece of art, a type of art movement or an artist. I used to do things like this with Maths or Literacy and especially Science, around the classroom, for early finishers, say.

(Having said that, I am a peripatetic...well, between the classrooms, not schools...art teacher...I have yet to have my own art room. We are having a new school built and plans were for it to be completed for the school year 2014/15 with me having a room. However...seeing as we're in the Middle East, it ain't working like that. And I will continue to lug that huge not-quite kid-proof Ace Hardware toolbox around, with it's handle and clips held on with bits of string. I'm going to see how much longer it'll last!)

Thanks Olive, you've inspired me to start collecting and creating activities like this for my fantasy classroom! In the meantime, for a plenary at least.

This Month's Artist - April

Another artist that Mad Murphy has brought to my attention is Dick Frizzell, another pop artist.

He's from Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. He brings in to his work icons from Kiwi kitsch. He's described as not just a pop artist but an artist in expressionist pop. This is something I'll be reading up on as I thought the two movements were very different to each other...how has he been described as the two together...? Mass consumerism of expression and emotion?

I always seem to be drawn to pop art yet not sure if I would ever have any on display in my home (maybe the Mickey to Tiki in the middle!) Yet when I paint or draw it’s never in any realist or impressionistic style, it’s always colour, full of pattern, abstract maybe (just read a definition of abstract art: free-hand jazz!). I think Rothko, Klimt and Kadinsky are my inspirations as far as abstract is concerned. I turn to Kahlo for colour. Richard Todd is another artist I like the look of. Maybe he'll feature soon in the monthly artist section.

This Month's Artist - March

This could be a new feature for the blog…we’ll see how it goes. I only thought of doing it this month as I have discovered a new inspirational artist, both as a person and as an artist. I offer no insightful opinion or any criticism of whichever artist I happen to write about, I haven't done the course ;-) It would merely be  to introduce the artist just because I am enjoying their work at the time.
 

So this month it is Frida Kahlo.

 

As I wrote before, I am eagerly awaiting her biography. But my fascination started with her only last year really. I remember seeing one of her portraits in a magazine and was intrigued simply by the person I saw in the paintings. With strong Latino features, sombre expression but so full of colour. Then I recently saw the movie on her life staring Salma Hayek and was mesmerised. I was just captured by how she dressed, I would be like that every day! And she wore flowers in her hair, I LOVE that!

Frida Kahlo de Rivera (July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954) was a Mexican painter. Her self-portraits are probably what she is known more for. Her vibrant and colourful work has been described for its “pain and passion”. Her work is apparently revered by feminists because of her simple and realistic approach to the female form and experience. I’m no feminist (I think!) and I just love her use of colour and brush. Her native culture and cultural tradition are features of her work and has been put into the naive or folk art category. These are new art movements for me so that’s my next research project! Even surrealism has been applied to her work. Subtly maybe, not quite a Dali..in my opinion, remember! Here’s a biography of her taken from http://www.fridakahlo.com/

Frida was one of four daughters born to a Hungarian-Jewish father and a mother of Spanish and Mexican Indian descent. She did not originally plan to become an artist. A survivor of polio, she entered a pre-med program in Mexico City. At the age of 18, she was seriously injured in a bus accident. She spent over a year in bed recovering from fractures to her spine, collarbone and ribs, a shattered pelvis, and shoulder and foot injuries. She endured more than 30 operations in her lifetime and during her convalescence she began to paint.

Source: www.egodesign.ca

 

Her paintings, mostly self-portraits and still life, were deliberately naïve, and filled with the colors and forms of Mexican folk art. At 22 she married the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, 20 years her senior. Their stormy, passionate relationship survived infidelities, the pressures of careers, divorce, remarriage, Frida's bi-sexual affairs, her poor health and her inability to have children. Frida once said: "I suffered two grave accidents in my life…One in which a streetcar knocked me down and the other was Diego." The streetcar accident left her crippled physically and Rivera crippled her emotionally. 

Source: www.proa.org

During her lifetime, Frida created some 200 paintings, drawings and sketches related to her experiences in life, physical and emotional pain and her turbulent relationship with Diego. She produced 143 paintings, 55 of which are self-portraits. When asked why she painted so many self-portraits, Frida replied: "Because I am so often alone....because I am the subject I know best."
In 1953, when Frida Kahlo had her first solo exhibition in Mexico (the only one held in her native country during her lifetime), a local critic wrote:
"It is impossible to separate the life and work of this extraordinary person. Her paintings are her biography." 

At the time of her exhibition opening, Frida's health was such that her Doctor told her that she was not to leave her bed. She insisted that she was going to attend her opening, and, in Frida style, she did. She arrived in an ambulance and her bed in the back of a truck. She was placed in her bed and four men carried her in to the waiting guests.

Both Frida and Diego were very active in the Communist Party in Mexico. In early July 1954, Frida made her last public appearance, when she participated in a Communist street demonstration. 

Soon after, on July 13th, 1954, at the age of 47, Frida passed away. On the day after her death, mourners gathered at the crematorium to witness the cremation of Mexico's greatest and most shocking painter. Soon to be an international icon, Frida Kahlo knew how to give her fans one last unforgettable goodbye. As the cries of her admirers filled the room, the sudden blast of heat from the open incinerator doors caused her body to bolt upright. Her hair, now on fire from the flames, blazed around her head like a halo. Frida's lips seemed to break into a seductive grin just as the doors closed. Her last diary entry read: "I hope the end is joyful - and I hope never to return - Frida.".

Her ashes were placed in a pre-Columbian urn which is on display in the "Blue House" that she shared with Rivera. One year after her death, Rivera gave the house to the Mexican government to become a museum. Diego Rivera died in 1957. On July 12th, 1958, the “Blue House” was officially opened as the “Museo Frida Kahlo”.

Frida has been described as: "…one of history's grand divas…a tequila-slamming, dirty joke-telling smoker, bi-sexual that hobbled about her bohemian barrio in lavish indigenous dress and threw festive dinner parties for the likes of Leon Trotsky, poet Pablo Neruda, Nelson Rockefeller, and her on-again, off-again husband, muralist Diego Rivera."

Today, more than half a century after her death, her paintings fetch more money than any other female artist. A visit to the Museo Frida Kahlo is like taking a step back in time. All of her personal effects are displayed throughout the house and everything seems to be just as she left it. One gets the feeling that she still lives there but has just briefly stepped out to allow you to tour her private sanctuary. She is gone now but her legacy will live on forever….

One of the first shots of the film is of her house in Coyoacan. Bright blue walls, colourful flowers and plants, pieces of art. I would love to have a house that I could just paint and design for ME, in my style, to call my own. (I once painted our living room orange. Every wall. With terracotta stencils.) So the house she lived in for most of her life is now a museum...here is a link to the Trip Advisor reviews. It's on my wish list!

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/proggirl1/3219574891/

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bokononist/5861641618/

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7593077@N03/2981887849/

Through my research on Frida I found this great post highlighting the person Frida was. Never embarrassed and true to herself. I'm trying to live this way! Thanks amber, a lovely and inspiring post about this incredible woman.

Moooore Books!!

So instead of buying the rest of the Scotland Street series I need to read, or any other series recommended by friends, I spent the rest of my Birthday Amazon voucher on Art books! I'm eagerly awaiting the call that they've arrived!

My purchases:

    

With my current obsession with her, this is the one I’m really looking forward to:

Not all work!

This is turning in to a teaching blog...not quite what I had wanted but as I have said before it is a big part of my life just now so once that settles down and I really find my feet then that's how it will be.

BUT I'm still a mama and wife (joint) number one.

I found this article recently, from the Huffington Post. Very few things like this hit home with me but this one did.

Here it is in full but here's the link if you want to.

The Mom Stays in the Picture

 

Last weekend, my family traveled to attend my oldest niece's Sweet Sixteen party. My brother and sister-in-law planned this party for many months and intended it to be a big surprise, and it included a photo booth for the guests. I showed up to the party a bit late and, as usual, slightly askew from trying to dress myself and all my little people for such a special night out. I'm still carrying a fair amount of baby weight and wearing a nursing bra, and I don't fit into my cute clothes. I felt awkward and tired and rumpled.

I was leaning my aching back against the bar, my now 5-month-old baby sleeping in a carrier on my chest (despite the pounding bass and dulcet tones of LMFAO blasting through the room) when my 5-year-old son ran up to me.

 

"Come take pictures with me, Mommy," he yelled over the music, "in the photo booth!"

 

I hesitated. I avoid photographic evidence of my existence these days. To be honest, I avoid even mirrors. When I see myself in pictures, it makes me wince. I know I am far from alone; I know that many of my friends also avoid the camera. It seems logical. We're sporting mama bodies and we're not as young as we used to be. We don't always have time to blow dry our hair, apply make-up, perhaps even bathe (ducking). The kids are so much cuter than we are; better to just take their pictures, we think.

 

But we really need to make an effort to get in the picture. Our sons need to see how young and beautiful and human their mamas were. Our daughters need to see us vulnerable and open and just being ourselves -- women, mamas, people living lives.

 

Avoiding the camera because we don't like to see our own pictures? How can that be okay? Too much of a mama's life goes undocumented and unseen. People, including my children, don't see the way I make sure my kids' favorite stuffed animals are on their beds at night. They don't know how I walk the grocery store aisles looking for treats that will thrill them for a special day. They don't know that I saved their side-snap, paper-thin baby shirts from the hospital where they were born or their little hospital bracelets in keepsake boxes high on the top shelves of their closets. They don't see me tossing and turning in bed wondering if I am doing an okay job as a mother, if they are okay in their schools, where we should take them for a vacation, what we should do for their birthdays. I'm up long past the news on Christmas Eve wrapping presents and eating cookies and milk, and I spend hours hunting the Internet and the local Targets for specially-requested Halloween costumes and birthday presents. They don't see any of that.

 

Someday, I want them to see me, documented, sitting right there beside them: me, the woman who gave birth to them, whom they can thank for their ample thighs and their pretty hair; me, the woman who nursed them all for the first years of their lives, enduring porn star-sized boobs and leaking through her shirts for months on end; me, who ran around gathering snacks to be the week's parent reader or planning the class Valentine's Day party; me, who cried when I dropped them off at preschool, breathed in the smell of their post-bath hair when I read them bedtime stories, and defied speeding laws when I had to rush them to the pediatric ER in the middle of the night for fill-in-the-blank (ear infections, croup, rotavirus).

 

I'm everywhere in their young lives, and yet I have very few pictures of me with them. Someday I won't be here -- and I don't know if that someday is tomorrow or thirty or forty or fifty years from now -- but I want them to have pictures of me. I want them to see the way I looked at them, see how much I loved them. I am not perfect to look at and I am not perfect to love, but I am perfectly their mother.

 

When I look at pictures of my own mother, I don't look at cellulite or hair debacles. I just see her -- her kind eyes, her open-mouthed, joyful smile, her familiar clothes. That's the mother I remember. My mother's body is the vessel that carries all the memories of my childhood. I always loved that her stomach was soft, her skin freckled, her fingers long. I didn't care that she didn't look like a model. She was my mama.

 

So when all is said and done, if I can't do it for myself, I want to do it for my kids. I want to be in the picture, to give them that visual memory of me. I want them to see how much I am here, how my body looks wrapped around them in a hug, how loved they are.

I will save the little printed page with four squares of pictures on it and the words "Morgan's Sweet Sixteen" scrawled across the top with the date. There I am, hair not quite coiffed, make-up minimal, face fuller than I would like -- one hand holding a sleeping baby's head, and the other wrapped around my sweet littlest guy, who could not care less what I look like.

 

 

Thank you Allison Tate, for making me rethink my own vanity and self-concern!

I hate having my picture taken, I really do. I've got worse as I've got older. I don't think I'm photogenic...there's an element of vanity in that statement but really, why bother having a photo of myself that I'm only going to grimace at and go all girly.

So I will take heed of this article and try to remember over the coming years...

:-D

 

 It dawned on me today that I think I am in love with my job.

(I'm awaiting that dip after the honeymoon period though....)
 
I'm just going through the previous plans for Year 6 and I am starting to really think how I can change it now to create my own plans and put my mark on Art education at the school.
 
So...year 6 have Aboriginal Art coming up according to last years plans (remember that I was just going to settle in to the job, work with what I had and then experiment) but they did an aspect of that in Year 3. I know and appreciate that I can progress and show a different aspect to this art. But hey, why not take the opportunity to introduce them to the art of another nation?

I have been in my element this afternoon. It's a day off and all I've been doing is researching Maori art, myths, legends and history. I am now in the process of creating three lesson plans and resources from scratch as I really cannot see much on TES or Pinterest (I  KNOW!!) for instance.

Anyway, doing it from scratch means I can create what I need. This will be in a couple of weeks so hopefully it will come together and I'll post them here.

For you, Mad Murphy! LOVE this picture!

This week’s wisdom…

…is from Andy Warhol. (I’m going to have to get some Pop Art into the curriculum somewhere!).

Think about them…if you can, act on them…and enjoy the results!

Happy Birthday Roald Dahl

It's Roald Dahl Day and he would have been 96.

To introduce Roald Dahl to my year 2 class last year and then to have them just grab any opportunity to read his books was a glowing highlight!

Preparing for my new job.

It's been quite a contented holiday so far...I've had a huuuuge list of jobs to do but they have been non-essential bits and bobs that I haven't had chance to do whilst working. But time is still going past so quick. I've been preparing for my new job too so I am hoping that our holiday in August will be just that, a holiday.

I wasn't sure where to start with the prepping. I've gone through plans left to me by by predecessor. So really, I could go straight into the job with just a little bedtime reading. However, I just feel a bit of a flutter when I realise I could really try and make this job, this role, my own. I could really set up my own lesson plans to fit the curriculum...my god, there are so many gorgeous, fun and exciting ideas on the internet that i could get quite carried away.

So many super art teaching blogs I have subscribed to; Deep Space Sparkle, Mrs. Brown's Art, Art is Basic, Pink and Green Mama, Cassie Stephens (love this girl, I WILL make her rock guitar apron!)...

And there are the standard topics each year is covering so I will try and vary those a little.

I've been really into the research and collation of  projects and standalone lessons that it's just occurred to me that I am going to have to be a teacher as well! Must remember my skills!

Maybe I'm being a little optimistic and over-excited (it's been known...)...maybe I should just take a deep breath and just find my feet first.

Oooh, and I've discovered my GCSE Art folder! What great fun was that, looking through all my coursework. I loved art at school, I remember. And I think I did a good few pieces. I might put them up in my Art office to remind me of how much I enjoyed art at school and how I'd love to inspire these children.

Help me! I'm pinned to my laptop!

Actually...don't help me.

I am completely hooked on Pinterest. I'm loving it. It is, like blogging, rather therapeutic...cathartic, if you like.

I have been inspired. I have laughed. I have found friends on there I was not expecting to find. I am feeling more prepared for being an art teacher. And this is just in the last few days! It is a goldmine of ideas, thoughts, inspiration, fun and gorgeousness!

I originally joined to get more teaching ideas. Which makes up one board. I now have another board for those funny retro quotes to amuse my girlfriends (one posted here for your perusal. V. funny), one for anything that relates to 'me'; one for education and learning; a fun one for the 'child at heart' in me; a photographic one; a home one which currently contains various permutations of pink and green in dining rooms (I've got '1 x green table cloth' on my shopping list so far...:-/); one for Einstein quotes (he's my heeeeeero!) and one called 'just because...' just because it's funny or appealing to me on that particular day. That saucy one of the teacher is in there. Love it!

I don't think I'm using it to its full potential just yet as, really I haven't got a scooby what's going on. I repin something and then I feel smug - in a 'oooh, someone's liked my inane facebook status!' kind of way - that someone repins it on their board.

As promised: