A Weekend to Appreciate Art

I am planning a field trip for the 7th and 8th grades to the Vangogh exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. We need a place to go afterwards for lunch and to kill some time. I thought the Museum of Outdoor Arts might work. I headed over there Saturday to check it out. Here are some of the sculptures there. Many had an Alice in wonderland theme.

They were setting up for a big concert next door at Comfort Dental Ampitheater.

This sculpture was across the street. I went to get a closer look. This is titled "the Fence"  It is supposed to represent stonehenge like closepin people. The park seemed very small. I'm going to get a look at the branch over by Santa Fe Drive.

I headed over to the Denver Art Museum. I just recently became a member and wanted to check out a couple new exhibits. The first was an airport architecture display. They featured the Denver International Airport and had models, videos, and descriptions. The design director Curtis W. Fentress is  one of the foremost airport designers in the world. Fentress Architects is currently at work on the modernization of LAX. They had models of several airports that he designed, Seattle, San Jose, Korea and the Los Angeles still under work. I highly recommend this exhibit if you like to fly.

The other exhibit that was on preview was El Anatsu, an African Artist who uses pieces of metal and bottlewraps, and caps to sew together with wire to create sculpture.

Here is a closeup of his works.

Matisse Collage Paper Art
The last stop of the Day was a class I had signed up for at the Denver Public Library. I had gone to one before and ifs a series called fresh air. I met a few of my Mile High Mixed Media artists there and we all sat together and had a good time cutting and talking.



These are two of my finished pieces. What do they look
Like to you?

It was fun to walk around and see others work

Wednesday the day for Dance

Notice mom and dad sitting on the rock in the foreground

Notice the dancers on the ground while the bass is played

 

Today the highlight was a trip to a dance venue called Jacobs pillow. It's another destination tucked into a forest of trees in becket Massachusetts . They have many theaters and even a video library devoted to dance. Our first show was held outdoors in an open air stage. We sat on rocks for chairs . The dance was very modern and used the spoken word and chairs. While one dancer was writhing on the stage, another plucked a string on the bass. I enjoyed the movement although I was lost on the meaning.

 

The finale was a treat with the Royal Winipeg Ballet dancing to Carmina Burana with 4 costume changes.

The movements were more progressive ballet with the whole piece danced to choral music. There were 22 dancers on stage at times. This was held in a building that was laid out in a wooden barn like feel. The dancing was phenomenally talented coming from all over to perform here.

 

For Our scheduled free time in the afternoon, dad and I explored the Hancock shaker Village nearby.

 

It was a living museum with beautiful architecture and gardens. This is the religious group known for their wooden furniture and shaker pegs on every wall. Unfortunately there are only 3 left due to their belief in celibacy.

 

 

I loved the colorful buildings and seeing the finely made baskets, chairs, brooms and boxes. The kitchen was well set up with stoves and ovens for multiple uses

And dumb waiters going to different floors for washing dishes ,cooking, and serving.

 

A week in the Berkshires

We enjoyed a drive through the green hills of New York state to get to our destination in. pittsfield Massachusetts . Patience was a virtue as I was on an elderhostal (now called road scholars) tour with my parents. I looked forward to spending some time together this week enjoying the arts. There are lectures and speakers included in the event we will see .

The town of Williamstown is the home of the Williams. College where the Clark museum and Williams. College Museum was located. Many church buildings of all shapes and sizes were passed on the way. Most very small and sometimes 3 or 4 next to one another. They are beautiful but wonder if they are spiritually full.

The Williams College Museum was small but had some nice pieces. One of the student projects filled a room of constructed architecture.buildings based on an artist. They even had the lesson plan displayed. Maybe a future project.

There was a nice Louise nevelson piece and a Greek vase I enjoyed. Some outdoor sculptures of eyeballs were fun to photograph.

The special exhibit At the Clark Museum was my fav. Clark had led an expedition to china and unearthed some burial sites. They had reconstructed sculptures and
objects of discovery.

There was a brand new annex with a walking trail through the woods. I loved the architecture to the. Building. The special exhibit continued there. I rode a golf cart with my dad to get there.

Student projects

We ended the evening with a new drama called the North Pool. This was excellently acted and the story proved much to talk about afterwards with the actors. A mystery that craft fully unfolded as the play progressed.

 

Collage and Corkscrews

The teachers at my school wanted to do a painting class on canvas. I taught them a collage mixed media class.

We all started with red backgrounds and added our choice of collage papers to texturize the background.

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Each person made some type of tree on the canvas with paper. Next we added paint for the trunks and sky.

We had 12 teachers come to the neighborhood center where we held the class. Of course, we had beverages and refreshments.

Here are some of the finished creations.

Reduction Lino Print

This was a carving in linoleum using the reduction technique.
While my 7th graders were making their plate, I carved one too.

 First step was to carve out the white areas and print with the yellow color.

Next I carved out the yellow  areas and printed again with light green , this only showed up the yellow color.

Finally I carved the green areas out and printed with the dark violet.

If I were to do this again , I would have the dark color outlining the skull.

This is the printing board I made so we could line up the pages each time. The process is call registration. At the top is a 3 hole punch to line up the paper each time. The plate is laid in the corner each time and the paper if put on top into the holes.
 I made two for my class and forgot to label one A and B because they were not exactly the same.
 I used mat board scraps and had to glue with epoxy on the plexiglass.

Each of these prints were done with one block

I was inspired at the Cincinnati Art museum we went to and saw a collection of Picasso Prints he had done using the reduction Printing method.

Picasso liked to carve in linoleum as he did with these three.

Artfest Day Three: Orly Avineri- Arboreal Messages

This was a workshop taught by Orly.  We each brought our own board book already gessoed or peeled away the illustrations. Orly began the class by talking about her childhood in Israel and how a tree made an impact in her life. We were all supposed to think about how trees affected us somehow.

We also brought a black and white photo of ourselves. Here I glued that down on one side.

Next we cut out a tree shape with a foamy sheet she gave us. We placed this over our photo and applied modeling paste around the stencil we made.

For this spread we used found papers we brought in. These were supposed to be  interesting papers we  picked up from the ground. We added masking tapes and applied paint. Lastly we sprayed inks ontop and blew with a straw to appear as roots of a tree.

Heres another spread I did in my book.

student examples

This is Orly's example of a tree shape with her pic

At the end we talked about everyones tree story and shared our pages.

Second Day at Artfest: Gina Armfield Watercolor birds of Prey

 These were two paintings I did in our Birds of a Feather Class. Look closely at the tips of the feathers to the right where we wrote a poem with tiny words using a magnifying glass.  I really enjoyed Gina's class. She was a Great Teacher and constantly helped us with our paintings. I loved the concept of layering the lighter and then darker colors. We used wet in wet for some of the mottled areas.

Gina gave us a lesson about types of paints, brushes and papers. The first step was to draw the shapes with our micron .001 pen.

This was the second step to add the lightest colors. We used a magnifying glass to see the blues and pinks in the beige colors.

These three birds were done by other students in the class. During our critique, Gina noted that everyone has their own style.

This was one of Gina's paintings.

At the end of the day we walked around the room and discussed each students paintings from the day. Note the cool light she recommended we get. Its a battery operated ott light with natural lighting. I could of used it. Also we needed a magnifying glass to see all the underlying colors in the image.