Ms. Kober | Archway Trivium Art: October 2015

Hello Archway Trivium families,

I cannot believe we have already made it through the first quarter! It has gone by so quickly but I am excited to introduce what we will be learning next in art. I hope that everybody had a wonderful fall break and it has truly been a pleasure to meet with many of you this week during conferences. In class we are reviewing some of the material we learned last quarter and discussing some new concepts and art history. In 3rd grade, we discussed how artists use light in artwork. We looked at several paintings and observed the way that light and shadows make the subject matter look realistic. They will be creating a still life in pastel using light and shadow to make it appear 3 dimensional. 4th grade is continuing their unit on art of the Middle Ages and is discussing the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. They will be creating their own version with pastels and colored pencils. 5th grade is moving forward in their Renaissance unit by observing and discussing still life paintings from that era. They will be creating a realistic still life drawing using colored pencils.

Over the break, I had the opportunity to go to California for a few days with my family and visit the Getty Center. It was my first time at the museum and I felt so fortunate be able to experience such a beautiful space! I still can't get over the magical scale and scenery at every turn in such a giant complex. We visited almost all of the galleries and viewed so much amazing artwork. I was able to photograph many of the pieces (without flash) so I was incredibly excited to share some of them with the students. The Getty had a special exhibit about Illuminated Manuscripts which I could not believe since it corresponds with the 4th grade projects. I also saw several master artworks that we have discussed in each grade or are relevant to the upcoming projects, so this made it neat to show photographs of these works that I saw first hand!