More Seniors' Art

Recently, I revived a previous lesson inspired by Wassily Kandinsky for a group art project with seniors. We were inspired by Kandinsky's 'Color Study: Squares with Concentric Circles'. I introduced the project by likening its pieces to Granny squares.

The project uses deli paper sheets that are taped atop a piece of white computer (or construction) paper that has a black outline of a 4"X4" square printed on it. You will have to trace a square if you use construction paper.

Students are instructed to draw/color abstract (imperfect) concentric circles to fill the entire (interior) square space with color. Even Kandinsky left white space occasionally! We used rather brightly colored Sharpies. You may also like using brush-style Sharpies.

I use liquid starch (STA-FLO brand) to decoupage the thin deli paper squares onto a stretched canvas. Oh, and the paper has a waxy side, so be sure to use the other side when you apply markers to your square. Even so, some markers will want to bleed through, which is another reason for a paper background layer.

Be sure to plan out your composition so that you have an even number of 4-inch squares. I recommend not purchasing your canvas until you know the proper dimensions. Sometimes there are absences and you may need to make an extra square or two. It's fun to ask the teacher of the classroom or another art volunteer to create their own piece to complete the group project.

For our next project, we will be doing scratch painting on prepared scratch paper art pads. I remember making my own scratch paper by coloring a piece of paper (with crayons or oil pastels?) and covering it with black (tempera?) paint or India ink. I'll have to investigate the process and make some of my own.

Using a pointed wooden stylus (toothpicks may work in a pinch), students will scratch lines to reveal the colors underneath. We will be creating our own flowers or try our hand at making butterflies. Some scratch pads come pre-drawn with gray images for budding artists to trace and reveal the underpainting colors. This is similar to adult coloring books, though seemingly too challenging for some.

For inspiration, I like to use a website that shows the top 10 flower paintings from the 16th century thru modern day. Many of the most famous artists are in this group: Eduard Manet, Claude Monet, Georgia O'Keefe, Vincent VanGogh, and Andy Warhol. You may also recognize Jan Brueghel the Elder, Albrecht Durer, Henri Fantin-Latour, Katsushika Hokusai, and Judith Leyster. The last two artists were new to me. VanGogh was probably familiar with the work of Hokusai since he often used the works of Japanese artists as inspiration for his own artwork. See my June 2019 post "Japanese Art and VanGogh".



So we didn't use the scratch paper and instead used tempera paints for our flowers. Then, we did butterflies on these beautiful scratch papers.















Our butterflies were inspired by Egyptian art from 1350 B.C., the Renaissance, a painting by Salvador Dali, and Damien Hirst's "Kaleidoscope" series of large paintings in which his patterned pieces are entirely composed of butterflies.

Continuing with the theme of butterflies, for New Year's we constructed them out of origami paper and pipe cleaners. The paper needs to be square and it is simple to convert almost any (thinner) rectangular sheet of paper into a square. Fold one corner diagonally toward the opposite side, then cut off the excess. Each butterfly uses two squares of the same size paper. It's fun to use two different patterned papers.


The inspiration for the butterflies was New Year's fireworks radiating out from a center point. Before getting to this project, I highlighted the works of Fauvist artist, Henri Matisse. Matisse liked to use paper cutouts. I also showed pictures of his museum in Nice, France, from our trip in 2011 and his works on display in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, from our Baltic cruise in June 2019.

Before Christmas, we made greeting cards using bubble-cut images printed off the InterNet. We then embellished them with stickers and markers.







For the Lunar New Year or Chinese Year of the Rat, we decided to make rat cookies using a Mickey Mouse cookie cutter that was bent to make a pointier nose.


While we baked and iced store-bought cookie dough and iced the cookies using butter-cream icing, the seniors decorated them. Some seniors also helped cut out the rat shapes.

We constructed pie slice boxes out of yellow tagboard and decorated the cookie boxes to look like cheese wedges using (black, brown, orange, and red) washable markers. The holes were drawn in marker using organic round shapes of different sizes, often colored in. The end of each box had a cute rat label saying, "Happy Chinese New Year 2020". The boxes were a fun way of transporting the cookies and made a nice gift for the caretakers.

2019 Pumpkins

The first pumpkin that I carved this year was in honor of the coffee shop I now frequent since our recent move. The Black Gold Coffee Company is located in Black Diamond, WA. The letter 'O' in 'GOLD' is meant to be a coffee bean. The black diamond shape in the unlit daytime version is a bit larger than I envisioned it and the coffee cup handle a bit too small. The owner immediately recognized that I was going for a coffee cup pumpkin.

Here's the night time version. If I had simply carved out the letters and carved an outline of the diamond it would have looked like a black diamond. I not only needed a toothpick to stabilize the 'GOLD' but the letters themselves began to shrink after a couple of days. 

This year I carved pumpkins with my family. There were five of us carving both store-bought and home-grown pumpkins. My wife did a Martha Stewart-inspired polka dot pumpkin, executing perfectly matching hole cutouts. My daughter did a monster from "Stranger Things", and I carefully peeled off lines to form the web design for Spiderman's head. My sister-in-law made a ghoul for hers and her husband a more traditional pumpkin face. Some of the pumpkins had pretty thick skins, so there was a lot of sawing!

Since three of the five awesome creations were taken home to Enumclaw and Seattle, I decided to carve two more pumpkins. One is the Cheshire Cat (left) from Alice in Wonderland and the other is the character Groot (right) from the movie Guardians of the Galaxy.

All of these pumpkins show a variety of carving techniques that are fun to try. It's also fun to carve different shapes and sizes of pumpkins. Your pumpkin doesn't have to be in the traditional orange color and may also be painted. Think about what you want on your pumpkin or simply dream up a spooky face. It's fun to remove the darker orange skin and even carve to different depths for a variety of values from light to dark.

Here are some more examples from a previous year. I am thinking of carving a witch's face out of one of those bumpy gourds next year.

The warts would already be there!

Salt Painting with Seniors

I was finally afforded an opportunity to teach a watercolor class at the Senior Center in Tacoma. Our focus was on various resist techniques including salt painting. Also available: (1) contact paper circles for preserving the white space for a full moon in our paintings;

(2) white crayons and oil pastels; and (3) saran wrap.

Some of my students were able to complete more than one painting in the time allotted.

Some chose more abstract landscapes experimenting with the salt along with the moon shape. The resulting textures achieved are difficult to show in these pictures.

One budding artist chose this Impressionistic rendition of flowers, possibly inspired by another watercolor painting hanging conveniently on the wall behind her. Again, it is difficult to see the effect of the salt that was applied to the wet paint. My laptop was updating for most of the session, otherwise, I would have shown more examples if using white crayons and oil pastels.

The examples were supposed to be inspired by Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas". Besides learning watercolor techniques, I wanted to teach about the concepts of movement and repetition. I was suggesting a white moon, warm or cool colors for the sky, and creepy looking black trees.

I enjoyed the tenacity of the students who went above and beyond the example and made the artworks their own. They didn't paint only one tree and a moonlit sky but actually achieved texture in their foregrounds and backgrounds by using salt to accentuate grass, dirt, and foliage.

Unfortunately, I missed a chance to photograph this layered landscape (left) sans the contact paper circle (moon). This work was done by my quilter.

Baseball HOF 2019 Induction Trip

In honor of Edgar Martinez making it into the Baseball Hall of Fame's Class of 2019, I was able to attend the induction events and experience family bonding with my two brothers. This involved flying into Detroit, Michigan, spending the night with my older brother at his home near E. Lansing, then driving back to Detroit to retrieve my younger brother and beginning our road trip to Cooperstown, NY. Turns out that my  Michigan brother and his wife have plenty of artwork of horses and dogs, not to mention my brother's extensive collection of baseball memorabilia.

These two watercolor portraits of Whippets are amazing! The two Whippets in motion is very futuristic and reminiscent of oil paintings by Marcel Duchamp.

On our road trip, we also visited some wineries. This photo is a great example of positive-negative space. Notice how the sky creates a negative space emulating leaves.

This heron sculpture was pretty impressive as well.

Once we arrived at the HOF Museum, I headed directly to the Frank and Peggy Steele gallery. "Art of Baseball", included works by the HOF resident artist, Justyn Farano. I was able to purchase a couple of his lithographs, such as the Class of 2019 & this KGJ work.

“Casey at the Bat”, c. 1975 (1938-2005)

“Tough Call” (1948)

Here are a couple of classics by Robert Heindel (left) and Norman Rockwell (right). In my 5th-grade classes, I like to use Rockwell's "The Dugout" to teach about perspective.

"Smokey Joe Williams" (1985) 

"The Hall of Famer" (1996)

Deryl Daniel Mackie's painting (left) reminds me of those of Kehinde Wiley whose portraits had been on display at the Seattle Art Museum. You may also recognize the painting (right) by Leroy Neiman.

There is so much more I want to show, including a silkscreen of NY Mets Pitcher, Tom Seaver, by Andy Warhol, and a collage-style picture by LaVern Brock (2006) made up of thousands of baseball cards depicting Phil Niekro's jersey.

Collage Portraits with Seniors

I often do a lesson with my 5th-graders that I like to call, 'wrapping paper self-portraits'. It was inspired by artists, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gilbert Stuart, and Amedeo Modigliani's "Girl With Braids". 

Rauschenberg collages

by Vera De-Gernier

For my recent class with seniors, I decided that we would explore collage portraits using a variety of styles and methods. As the inspiration, I used Robert Rauschenberg's collages of JFK  as inspiration. I also found a mixed-media collage of Marilyn Monroe.

My own example (left) is inspired by the Baseball HOF induction of Edgar Martinez following my recent trip to Cooperstown, NY. Tissue paper is very easy to apply using liquid starch as the adhesive. Simply brush the surface of the paper with a little starch, then carefully lay cut or torn pieces of tissue where you want it and coat lightly with more starch. You don't need much starch. The less you use the quicker it will dry. As there is a tendency to use too much starch, your paper may curl and need to be lightly ironed later to flatten. Instead of regular white construction paper, we used an old pad of stiffer watercolor paper.

Here are some more examples I found on the Internet that were used to further inspire my senior students to create their own collages.

I am pleased to say that everyone went outside the box and created something completely their own. We even went high-tech with a monitor for displaying examples.

I'm excited to show the amazing results from a very successful collage portraits class. In addition to using tissue paper for the chicken (left), the artwork on the right made use of floral napkins in her collage.

This 'Gardener' (left) reminds me of the character Wilson from the old Tim Allen show, "Home Improvement". Mary's version is probably an homage to Mrs. Wilson.

The collage (right) makes use of a National Geographic photo of an archaeological dig. The artist made a collage surrounded by rocks to form a beautiful canyon setting for her landscape. The torn paper edges and range of values contribute to a balanced composition pleasing to the eye.

Judy challenged herself to make her collage from a family portrait. She placed a photo under a piece of clear acetate and began to draw the facial features using a silver Sharpie, then she pasted both torn and cut out pieces of patterned paper on as details. I suggested adding cardstock behind the decorated acetate to stabilize the work. She added the frame in a contrasting color. A truly beautiful result!!

The final portrait is very lively, complete with wonderful textures and colors. This artist found the hat (I'm guessing) in a magazine, along with several other great patterned papers. Notice the hair is actually fishes swimming in blue water. This work may look simple, but it was very well-planned and executed using contrasting colors and a variety of value and texture. The simple background makes the old man stand out. Well done!

Baltics (4 of 7) - St. Petersburg, Russia

Another bus tour was our first guided excursion to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. This is a massive (2nd largest in the world) and historic museum. The main building was known as the Winter Palace and was decorated very opulently by the Empress Catherine the Great. Our guide was able to point out to us the 'most important' pieces since we were only given a few hours to explore the entire space.

Here is the Military Gallery which originally contained 332 portraits of Generals who fought in the War of 1812. 

Throughout the rooms of the Winter Palace were plenty of opulent ceilings the designs of which were reflected in the intricate patterns of the wood floors. Often there were mosaic tile patterns on the floors.

Even the large marble vases and tabletops were done using mosaics. Due to the reflective surfaces, it was difficult to show the detail without showing windows and my handy smartphone.

One tabletop, in particular, caught my eye as it emulated the 'Pollock Polygons' hexagon project I did this year with my 5th-graders.

"Madonna Litta" by Leonardo da Vinci was on view behind protective glass much like the Mona Lisa that we saw on display at the Louvre in May 2011. The Internet also credits painter, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio as the 2nd artist of this Madonna painting. I could show many more paintings, including several by Rembrandt, but I wouldn't be able to downselect.

On our way, our guide pointed out "The Bronze Horseman" located in Senate Square and dedicated to Peter the Great.

In Monument Palace Square opposite the Winter Palace is the Alexander Column dedicated to Alexander I.

Another must-see is the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. We were early to our second excursion to see the ballet, so we were able to stroll through a souvenir market on the way to capture a photo of this opulent church. Like many of the buildings we saw it too was under renovation.

Inside the Mariinsky Theatre, we watched the two-act ballet, Giselle. Our guide led us to believe that we were going to be seeing Swan Lake. His joke didn't resonate with some of his English-speaking passengers.

The most impressive decoration was over the stage and on the ceiling.

My photos certainly don't do the artwork justice, though I think I captured the chandelier pretty well.

We saw the city lit up at night, then went on another boat tour the 2nd day. The bridges were also well-decorated.