Coming Soon! The Peirce School Annual Concert and Art Show: March 15, 2012

Students in all grades have been hard at work preparing for this year's show, which promises to be another special event, this time with a historical theme. Out of Darkness, Into the Dawn: The Middle Ages Meets the Renaissance will feature an art exhibit and concert inspired by the art of the Middles Ages and music from the Renaissance period. Children's songs, dances and a bit of theater and history will be represented by all students in grades K-5. Selections will be posted here after the show in an upcoming post.

The show will take place on March 15, 2012 at 9am in the Gym and lower lobby. (Please note the recent date change from earlier bulletins.) We look forward to seeing you!

Kindergarten: Fabulous Feasts!

Many artists use food as subject matter for their work, and food is often present at celebrations of all kinds. Kindergarten students have spent the past few months focused on the many aspects of celebration: masks and costumes, party drawings and now feast collages! After identifying what a “feast” is, students discussed the selected food-related artworks before listing their own favorite foods they would enjoy.
Students were then instructed to create a feast by cutting out appropriate shapes and colors to represent various foods, imagining the colored paper background as their “tabletop”. Small details and texture could be added using oil pastels, and students were encouraged to include and think about other table-setting objects such as dishes, flatware and drinking glasses.

Kindergarten: Stick Puppets

Kindergarteners wrapped up their costuming unit with a lesson on constructing stick puppets. This was also a good segway into our next lessons which will be about celebrations. Students were first shown reproductions of the above artworks and led through a discussion with a series of questions:

“What are the people doing?”
“What are the people wearing?”
“What have the artists repeated in these artworks?” (lines, shapes, colors, patterns, positions of figures, costumes and uniforms)

Children were especially guided to notice the interesting clothing worn by the performers depicted in each of these artworks, and were then told they would be constructing stick puppets of people wearing interesting costumes. Students were first instructed to draw the shape of the person onto a piece of oak tag, then cut out the person using scissors, and finally decorating their puppets using a variety of collage materials made available at their table.

February Masterpiece of the Month: The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough

Who made it?

This painting was created by an English artist named, Thomas Gainsborough, in 1770.

Where is the REAL one?

The real painting can be seen at The Huntington Collection Library in San Marino, CA.

Why is this artwork important?

The Blue Boy is Gainsborough's most famous artwork out of the hundreds he painted. It is believed to be the portrait of the son of a wealthy merchant, however, there is no proof. Most likely it is a tribute to a much earlier artist, Anthony Van Dyck (1559-1641), whom Gainsborough greatly admired. We know this because the portrait features historical costume. The Blue Boy is wearing clothing that was in fashion over a hundred years before this picture was painted. In fact, The Blue Boy bears a strong resemblance to Van Dyck's painting, George and Francis Villiers, which is another portrait of young boys dressed in cavalier costumes.

While being a successful portrait painter, Gainsborough prefered to paint landscapes and would often try to work natural scenery into the portrait backgrounds as he does in The Blue Boy. However, what makes this painting so striking from Gainsborough's other works is the strong, dignified pose of the boy, the glow of his face from the darker background, and the highlighting on his satin suit and left leg as it steps forward. These subtle elements show us Gainsborough's mastery of skill as a painter.

February Master of the Month: Thomas Gainsborough

Thomas Gainsborough is best known as an English portrait painter. He was well-known during his lifetime, painting the portraits of the English King and Queen and other important people, yet he had little interest in painting portraits and prefered to paint landscapes, instead. For this reason, Gainsborough would often include natural scenery in the background of many of his portraits.Due to his fame, Gainsborough was able to help establish the Royal Academy of the Arts in London, which became a famous institution for artists to exhibit their work and a school to educate people about art. Gainsborough was admired for the speed with which he applied his paint, and he worked more from his observations of nature than from any formal rules. His later work was characterized by a light palette and easy, quick strokes.