Shoe Still Life in the Style of Van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 in the Netherlands. He tried many other jobs first and became an artist late in life. He suffered from an illness that made him sad and angry sometimes. Even though he died young, and was only an artist for ten years he still created allot of paintings. Van Gogh liked to use bright colors and sometimes made beautiful paintings out of unexpected subjects such as shoes.The Kindergarten and first grade art students made a Shoe Still Life in the Style of Van Gogh using paper, markers, crayons, scissors, 3-d tape and yarn.

 
 

  

The Silent Crtique

This is an idea I heard about from a video by Timothy Bogatz at the theartofed.com .  (I had to tweak the idea a little due to the size of my classroom and age of my students.  

Over the last two weeks I had on display 6 - 7 pieces of artwork created by students from the 3rd - 6th grade.  The names of the artists were covered by a sticky note with a number on it.  As the classes came in  the students were handed a small piece of paper and asked to write a compliment or two about one of the works on display.  Since they did not know who created the piece they were not influenced by who the artist was and were able to really concentrate on what they liked about the work.  The compliments got taped onto the backs of the projects before I filed the artwork into the students portfolios.  By the end of the week all the students had compliments taped to the back of their Cubism Portraits.

 

Cubism is an early-20th-century art movement that was pioneered by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.  In Cubist artwork, objects are broken up and reassembled in an abstract form many times made up of geometric shapes.  Instead of showing objects from one viewpoint, the artist shows the subject from a several points of view at once.  Our students created cubism portraits using construction paper, glue sticks, markers, pastels, crayons, color pencils and watercolors.