Ms. Stupp's
Art Room BBHCSD Blog

Georgia O'Keeffe

nam june paik

After exploring lines, 1st graders have moved on to studying shapes.  We are finding the different ways that artists use shapes to create works of art in a unique way.  We have been inspired by two artists that worked in America, Georgia O’Keeffe and Nam June Paik. 

 O’Keeffe uses natural shapes to depict nature.  She paints nature larger than life to highlight the details and make you pay attention.  We chose leaves from a variety of trees, as a beautiful autumn inspiration. 

a sasafras tree leaf shape

Each student looked at their leaf and drew the beautiful, natural shape really big!  Using a magnifying class, we looked for and drew all the lines and details on the inside of their leaf.  To show the amazing color of fall leaves we oil pasteled the lines, and used watercolors to paint in the spaces, over the oil pastels.  Gorgeous colors and shapes! 

Look for our “O’Keeffe Leaf” hanging in the halls of Highland and Hilton!

We are now investigating the “Father of Video Art,” Nam June Paik.  Paik was born in Korea, and moved to the US to become an artist.  Paik uses TVs, video, technology to make all kinds of sculpture; our favorite is his robots.    We discovered many geometric shapes in his sculpture, circles, squares, rectangles, triangles!  We are exploring 2-D vs. 3-D shapes to build our own robots.  

We have found many ways that Nam June is opposite from Georgia: Nam June is a boy/Georgia is a girl, Georgia was born in America/Nam June in Korea, Georgia paints nature/Nam June uses machines, Nam June’s work is 3-D/Georgia’s is 2-D, Georgia uses natural shapes/Nam June uses geometric shapes.  “They are different but they are the same, they are both great artists!”

We learned to fold a 2-D rectangle into a 3-D box, to make a pretend TV…then glued it to our paper.  We then explored how to fold, curl, roll, bend, and glue a variety of geometric shapes to make them pop-out.  We used these shapes to build the body of our robots, than used gadgets to print the background.  Check out our geometric, 2-D and 3-D Robots-complete with pretend TVs!

1st Grade art students have just completed a unit studying the various qualities of lines used in art works…exploring many ways to make lines and different media to make them with. 1st graders drew lines, made 3-D paper lines, and found lines in a variety of materials to decorate Line Hats. They thought of many words to decribe different lines and the feelings lines can express.
Then we watched a movie made in 1952 of the famous American painter Jackson Pollack creating one his action paintings. In response kids moved around the art room using different colors and objects to create action paintings with spontaneous lines.