3rd Grade
1. Alvaro and Christina by Wyeth
The Artist
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) was a realist painter who captured portraits and
scenes of Americana in water color and egg tempera. Wyeth is likely the most popular
painter of America, although he avoided the limelight. He was the youngest of 5
children, born to a famous book illustrator. He grew up surrounded by people who
loved creating art. His dad let him work in his studio without influencing him. He
was very talented. At 20 years old, he had his first show in NYC. Until his recent
passing in 2009, he lived in Pennsylvania and Maine, sketching and painting familiar
sights, old buildings, and his friends.
The Art
Andrew liked to paint his friends’ houses, and this one is the Olson’s house Alvaro and Christina Olson. It was once an inn used by the crews of ships sailing
down the coast of Maine. For many years, Christina and her younger brother, Alvaro
lived there. Al was once painted by Wyeth, but never wanted to pose for another
painting, so Wyeth continued to paint the things that belonged to him – like his
blueberry baskets, his barn and his boat. Christina was crippled since childhood
(polio). Andrew painted her many times. Just after they died, Wyeth walked through
the house and wanted to paint this painting. The title refers to the 2 doors used by
Alvaro and Christina as they passed from the shed to the kitchen. Which items in the
painting remind you of Alvaro, and which ones remind you of Christina?
As you look as this painting how do you feel? Do the colors make you feel a
certain way? Wyeth was able to sketch and then paint right inside the shed looking
closely at every object. He was able to change what he saw in order to achieve
balance, or make things more simple. What message was Wyeth trying to give us?
What was he able to say about his 2 friends who lived here? Can you see how he used
light from a window to spotlight certain things? He contrasted items that he wanted us
to notice. He placed bright against dull, curves against straight lines, texture against
smooth surfaces…This is a realistic portrait, and yet modern, because of where each
object is placed.
Do you feel this painting tells you how Wyeth felt about his friends?
Art Project
Materials: paper, pencil, or markers
Draw a portrait of someone who is important to you. While you need not
include this person, be sure to include items in your picture that are important to or
belong to this person.
3rd Grade
2. Cocktail Party by Marisol
The Artist
Marisol Escobar was born in Paris in 1930 and then moved to Los Angeles at
the age of 16. She went back to Paris to study art and then moved to New York City
at 20. She is still living and goes by her first name, Marisol. She began making
wooden sculptures because she was interested in Folk Art and Mexican themes. She
wanted art to be funny and not so serious, so she added bits of discarded objects she
had collected. She found her style in the Pop Art of the 1960’s.
Pop Art pokes fun at everyday culture in America and uses everyday objects as
symbols of our life. Things like pictures of Cambell’s soup cans done by Andy
Warhol were done as art for the first time. It was very shocking back then. Now it’s
common to see a huge crayon bank or a beanbag chair that looks like a baseball. They
are kinds of Pop Art images.
The Art
The Cocktail Party was completed in 1966. It is an assemblage of 15 life size
sculptured figures made of wood, paint, fabrics and other objects. It’s hard to tell
which clothes are paint and which are real. The heads each have a different version of
Marisol’s own face. It’s a funny look at partygoers. Look at all the faces…can you
see which ones are “nosy, 2 faced, a wall flower?” Marisol was making a comment
on the way most parties were at that time. She felt many people there were more
concerned about how they looked, than about who they were as people. Can you
name some of the materials she used?
Art Project
Materials Needed: lots of magazines, paper, scissors, gluesticks
Have kids create a party scene using faces, clothing, and bodies from
magazines. They must try to mix up heads, bodies, and clothes from different pictures
to create their scene. They can even use mouths, eyes, or hair from different pictures
in their creation of party goers.
3rd Grade
3. Cloud Gate by Anish Kappor
The Art: Chicago’s very own ‘Bean’ at Millennium Park downtown. Officially titled Cloud
Gate, ‘The Bean’ is British artist Anish Kapoor’s first public outdoor work installed in the United
States. The sculpture was selected during a design competition in 1999 and was completed in 2006.
The cost of the sculpture was first estimated at $6 million; this escalated to $23 million by
the time it was complete. No public funds were involved; all funding came from donations from
individuals and corporations.
It is expected to survive for 1,000 years. The lower 6 feet of Cloud Gate is wiped down
twice a day by hand with a Windex-like solution. And the entire sculpture is cleaned twice a year
with 40 gallons of liquid detergent.
The elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates,
which reflect the city’s famous skyline and the clouds above. Cloud Gate weighs over 110 tons, and
is 66 feet long and 33 feet high. A 12-foot-high arch provides a “gate” to the concave chamber
beneath the sculpture, inviting visitors to touch its mirror-like surface and see their image reflected
back from a variety of perspectives. Inspired by liquid mercury, the sculpture is among the largest
of its kind in the world, measuring 66 feet long by 33 feet high.
Anish Kapoor stated, “What I wanted to do in Millennium Park is make something that
would engage the Chicago skyline…so that one will see the clouds kind of floating in, with those
very tall buildings reflected in the work. And then, since it is the form of a gate, the participant, the
viewer, will be able to enter into this very deep chamber that does, in a way, the same thing to one’s
reflection as the exterior of the piece is doing to the reflection of the city around.” When standing
underneath, the reflections are like those of fun houses.
Art Activities, two short activities to bring the sculpture concept and creativity alive:
Materials: A sheet of aluminum foil for each student. Paper to sketch a draft of a sculpture.
1) Take a sheet of aluminum foil, cut into strips or use whole sheet. Create a model of a
sculpture.
2) Sketch a pop art sculpture on a piece of paper of an everyday item that you use. Where
would the sculpture be placed? What would it be made of?
3rd Grade
4. A Girl with a Watering Can by Renoir
The Artist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in 1841 in Limoges, France. He was the sixth of
seven children. His family moved to Paris in 1844, where his father worked as a tailor. As he
grew up he sang in the church choir. His voice was so beautiful that his teacher thought he
should become an opera singer. As a boy he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing
talents led him to be chosen to draw designs on fine china. In 1860 Renoir became a copyist at
the Louvre museum in Paris. For four years he was to copy the works off the master painters
which hung in the museum. He learned to paint very quickly. He found work by decorating
more that 20 cafes in Paris. However, he lived as a ‘starving artist’, often times not having
enough money to buy paint. In 1861 Renoir went to art school under Charles Gleyre, a Swiss
teacher who offered practical instruction to a number of artists, and these were the future
Impressionist painters Monet, Sisley, Bazille. In 1862 Renoir enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux
Arts and he was there for a few years. Other artists whom he met around this time were FantinLatour, Pissarro, and Cezanne. By 1863, the nucleus of the future Impressionist group was
formed.
Impressionism departed radically from existing traditions of European art. These impressionist
artists rejected the notion that high art should represent elevated subjects from mythology,
history, or religious sources. These avant-garde artists turned their attention to the people, sites,
and scenes of their own age in the 1860s and 1870s. The impressionists wanted to capture
momentary effects: the flux and movement of modern life, the fleeting properties of light on
forms in nature. They devised new techniques of painting to achieve this aim. Their broken
brushwork, irregular surfaces, heightened color, and sense of spontaneity gave physical
expression to their perceptions of a particular time and place. Their contemporaries regarded the
paintings as crude and sketchy. At the first public exhibition of these works, the artists were
disparagingly called mere “impressionists” by the conservative art critic Louis Leroy.
In 1869 Renoir and Monet worked together and produced what are usually regarded as the first
landscape paintings in which the impressionist style of painting is properly evident. Through the
practice of painting light and water en plein air (in the open air), Renoir and Monet discovered
that the color of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of the objects surrounding
them, and effect today known as diffuse reflection. The quick brush strokes of different colors
kept the colors vibrant and allowed the eye of the person viewing it to ‘mix’ the colors. In the
summer of 1873, Renoir went to stay with Monet near Paris on the Seine River. Several pairs of
paintings exist in which Renoir and Monet, working side by side, depicted the same scenes.
By the 1880s, the nucleus of Impressionist artists evolved apart, each moving into other modes
of painting. Renoir’s early work was typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of
sparking color and light. But by the mid 1880s, he had started to apply a more disciplined,
formal technique to portraits and figure painting, particularly of women. During a trip to Italy in
1881, he was inspired by works of Raphael and other Renaissance masters, to adopt a more
classical style. He felt convicted that he was on the wrong path, and for the next several years he
painted in a more severe style, in an attempt to return to classism. He concentrated on his
3rd Grade, Renoir Page 2 of 2
drawing, and emphasized the outlines of figures. After 1890, he returned, from this period
onward, to the use of thinly brushed color which dissolved outlines as in his earlier work. In
1890 he married a young lady who had modeled for his work, and they had four children. His
son Jean became a notable filmmaker and his other son Pierre became a stage and film actor.
A prolific artist, Renoir painted everyday and made about 6,000 paintings during his 78 years of
life. He thought a picture should be “a pleasant thing, joyful and pretty” and his work, timeless
and attractive, reflected that philosophy. Renoir was intrigued by the delicate beauty of the
female form. Renoir’s paintings are notable for their vibrant light and saturated color, capturing
people in intimate and candid compositions. With freely brushed touches of color, his figures
softly fuse with one another and their surroundings. The warm sensuality of Renoir’s style made
his paintings some of the most well-known and frequently reproduced works in the history of art.
The Art: A Girl with a Watering Can, 1876, oil on canvas This painting has long been a
favorite of visitors to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. -- and it seems that Renoir
painted it with exactly this hope, that it would please a large audience. The first impressionist
exhibition, in 1874, had brought Renoir and his fellow artists more notoriety than business, and
the auction he optimistically organized for his own work the following year was a financial
disaster, which he could not afford. He began to paint charming, light-filled scenes with women
and children, like this one, in the hopes of increasing sales. He probably thought that the pretty
child in her fancy dress might also attract portrait commissions. Although it was landscape that
had provided the first, and most important, inspiration for impressionism, Renoir's instinct
always led him back to the figure.
The deep blue of the dress, the bright red of the bow and the girl's lips, and the cool greens of the
lush garden behind her are all given a prismatic brilliance by Renoir's brushwork. Rather than
blend his colors, Renoir has applied them in individual touches that dissolve edges and seem to
shimmer with light. Notice how Renoir captured the sunlight falling on blonde curls. He felt the
skin of the subject, with porcelain skin tone and petite features, should look so supple, that we
feel drawn to reach out an pinch it. Impressionism sought to capture the effect of light on the
senses, communicating a visual signal with each stroke of the brush.
Art Project:
Materials needed: white construction paper, paints, sponge brush, paint brush, Q-tip
Study the landscape of the art piece. Note the lighter colors in the background. Vivid colors on
the main subject in the center. Bright colors of larger flowers in foreground. Use paints to
replicate the landscape of the art piece. Sponge brushes for background. Paint brushes in the
center to paint something with a bright, not blended color, and use a Q-tip in the front for
detailed flowers.
3rd Grade
5. Chinese Horse from Paleolithic Period
The Art Prehistoric cave drawings. Used to record life in tribes. This drawing was done 17,000
years ago. Artists were honored members of prehistoric community. There are many limestone
caves in the region and there are probably more cave paintings to be discovered.
This ancient horse was called "Chinese" because of its resemblance to 3,000 year old Sung
dynasty horse paintings. A pictograph refers to painted (as opposed to carved) representations
created by our pre-historic ancestors. The lovely painted horse, represented in our exclusive full
size recreation, was found painted on the calcite covered walls deep within the subterranean
tunnels at Lascaux (pronounced las-co), France. The artist painted by flickering fire light, using
handmade paint consisting of ground pigments combined with animal fat. The paint was applied
directly to the wall, or, in some cases, blown through hollow reeds for special effects. The
delicate execution of the painting and its remote underground location suggest the artist wanted
the work to be protected and survive. It remained hidden until the cave was discovered by
children and explored in the 1940s.
Prehistoric paintings in caves are well preserved because it is cool and dark in caves – keeps
paintings protected. Artists painted and drew common animals, hunting scenes. Sometimes used
bumpy surface of the cave wall to suggest an animal’s form. Made paint from minerals/rocks
pounded into powder and mixed with animal grease, honey, blood. Or they could paint the
powder directly onto a damp wall (watercolor) Paint onto a rough (sand or dirt) covered cave
wall as well.
Does the horse look like the horses of today?
What do you think the lines and forms around it are?
Art Project (option 1)
Materials needed: either tagboard or paper, glue sticks, plain or colored sand, available on the
Art Enrichment cabinet.
Have kids trace an outline of a horse that you provide, or have them draw their own horse. Use
glue sticks to cover the area of the horse, sprinkle sand onto glue. They can make their “cave
horses” colorful using different colors of sand, or plain playground sand.
Art Project (option 2)
Materials needed: large tan or white paper, watercolors, brushes, water, salt
Have kids make their own “cave” paintings using water colors – give them subject matter.
(horses, plants, people, things they think they would see if they were living during that time) Fill
up a paper cup half way with table salt. Add just enough water to make a thick paste. After kids
have painted picture, they can paint over their paintings with this salt paste. (salt should dry and
provide sandy texture and sparkle a little.) An easy way to do this…is to walk around to their
desks and when they’ve finished their picture, you can paint the salt paste onto their paintings.