I hope everyone is settling into the new year and enjoying this beautiful, warm January in Arizona. After the week of evaluations and conferences, students took home their portfolios from last semester and created new ones for this semester. They took home all work (mostly from the fall quarter) but not any final projects yet. Most of the work they took home were bell work assignments, practice drawings, art critiques, and other classwork.
During the spring, each Archway campus will be hosting a fine arts week that includes spring choir concerts and the annual art walk. This is a time for students to show off their best work from the year, so their projects will stay safely in the art room until then. Each student will choose one or two of their best artworks to be hung in the halls for everyone to admire. This is an exciting time to see all of the hard work that the students have been doing all year. After the art walk, students will take home all of their projects from the year. More information about the art walk for Trivium East and Trivium West will be coming soon!
New projects will be posted soon as the students are finishing up their work. In 5th grade, we are studying Michelangelo Bunarroti and his iconic Renaissance figure drawings and sculptures. Students are creating a drawing of their hand using close observation like the old masters did to create the illusion of realism. We discussed the importance of drawing from closely looking at details and relationships of shapes to create correct proportions of the hand. We looked at several artists' sketches that are lesser known to appreciate that they all began as art students and studied the human form before they went on to create master paintings that we recognize today. A few of the artists' drawings we looked at are shown below.
Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam
Pages from Da Vinci's Sketchbooks
Durer's Hand Sketches
Van Gogh Hand Sketches
Phoenix Art Museum is hosting a Michelangelo exhibit that is going on now through March 27th entitled Michelangelo: Sacred and Profane. I haven't experienced this yet, but I am looking forward to visiting the museum soon to view some of the rarest Michelangelo figure sketches, architectural drawings, and memoirs. This would be an exciting opportunity for the students (especially 5th grade) to be able to get a first hand experience of the master artist's sketches and drawings! The Phoenix Art Museum is free Wednesdays from 3-9 pm; there is a small fee for admission into the Michelangelo exhibit (adults- $8 and students- $5, or free for museum members). More information about this event here: http://www.phxart.org/exhibition/michelangelo. Have a lovely weekend!
