Of Britto, Rizzi & Pirates!!!

From the Art Room....by Carey:

I decided to begin our school year with studying self portraits in different styles gaining inspiration from different contemporary artists.

The Grade 3's are basing their class work on the theme of Pirates.  In the art room they produced exciting mixed media Pirate Portraits.  Here we discussed the correct positioning and proportion of the features - there was much excitement as the children added gold teeth, earrings, scars, nose rings, braids and even bandanas to their pirates with a designer flair!  The most exciting thing was naming these salty rogues!

The work of well known American 'Pop Artist' James Rizzi, whose paintings are cartoon-like, with bold vibrant, exciting images and colours was studied by the Grade 4 classes.  Self portraits in Rizzi style were produced, showing the big, bright eyes which is a Rizzi trademark.  How the children loved doing this!

Rizzi designed and constructed many buildings, and much of his work shows city scenes with colourful buildings.  We decided to use paint chips and stickers to create a city scene of buildings on the background of our portraits.  Excellent results were obtained to the delight of all!

Grade 5's took Rizzi's work a little further by painting colourful buildings forming the background of their self portraits.  What fun this work was!

 Romero Britto is a neo-pop painter and sculptor.  He combines stereotypical elements of cubism, pop art and graffiti in his work.  The Gr 6 children found his work wonderfully absorbing, and carefully executed beautifully completed self portraits in pastels.

Our Gr 7 classes continued the portrait theme by producing ethnic African Masks. Having seen metalwork projects done by schools in America and Europe, I wanted to try this too.  I encountered many problems in trying to source aluminium for this project.  No one could supply me with the Aluminium sheets which seemed so freely available elsewhere.  It was time to think ' out of the box', and lo and behold, inspiration struck like a lightning bolt (not too much of that happens usually!!!).  I contacted a catering company and asked for lasagne dish lids. The journey in experimentation began - blunt pencils, knitting needles, nintendo styluses, hair clips .....all were used for the embossing.  Permanent markers were added for colour.  The hair extensions were purchased from one of my favourite stores - PEP!  The children loved this project and produced AMAZING results!  Well done, Grade 7's!

What a CREATALICIOUS start to the year!!