Artist: HENRI MATISSE

For our most recent project, we learned about a French artist named

HENRI MATISSE.

He was a painter who also created artwork using a technique called

"carving in color".

Matisse perfected this idea of cutting and layering painted papers into interesting compositions in his later years.

We based our project on the painting of his shown below called

The Beasts of the Sea. 

 

The Beasts of the Sea

Henri Matisse

Like Matisse, we started our project by painting many sheets of white paper in a variety of bright, bold colors.

 

Next, we each cut smaller SQUARES and RECTANGLES from the painted paper and glued them onto a tall piece of white paper. We OVERLAPPED the shapes carefully leaving a BORDER of white around all sides.

 Then, we cut out some "silly shapes" (shapes from our imagination that have no names) from the painted paper and layered them onto our colorful squares and rectangles.

 We saved our smallest silly shapes for finishing touches on the last (top) layer.

We had to be very careful while gluing so the wet glue didn't "lift" the paint from the paper.

We had to make sure we were layering colors different from those we had already used.

The finished pieces have a beautiful long shape

and are most colorful!

In addition to the sampling of individual paintings shown below, each class also painted a larger than life Matisse style mural which hang from the ceiling near the teacher's mailboxes.

We hope you'll stop by to take a look!