Sunday, October 30, 2011

Fish On Parade - 4th Grade

Our first major project in 4th grade this year was a painting project based around Horses on Parade. Rochester has a rich background in public sculpture. From the Horses on Parade to Animals on Parade, The Light Houses throughout West Irondequoit to the Benches on Parade, it seems there's always some sort of public art on display in our area. We took a look at a couple of the different horses to see what the artists were doing. The first two we looked at were working with the idea of characters. One was a comic book hero, the other was a movie hero...

These artists took all the key elements of the Heroes and applied them to the form of the horse. Their skill in adding these details make it obvious that we are looking at Batman and Rocky Balboa. So then we looked at artists that paint about things that they are interested in or influenced by. In this example the artist was really interested in Jazz music and created an intricate composition of instruments and musicians as well as sculptural details in the legs and mane.
The last category we explored was location. A few of the artists that participated in this project decorated their horses with images of the community. Whether it be an image of the canal or the city skyline at night. They used the surface of the horse as a three dimension canvas and filled with elements from where they lived.
Now for our version of this project we decided to try fish as our canvas. We settled on fish because when fish swim together they call it a school. Students had three categories to draw from:
1. A character, it could be from a cartoon, comic book, movie, story ...
2. An interest : sports, activities, music, art...
3. A location, this could be where they live or a place they like to visit or would like to visit.
There are always ideas that are really interesting but might not fit one of the three categories, so when it's possible, we include those as well. Once they are all painted, we concentrate on outlining with sharpie to re-focus our images and clean up any mistakes where paint overlapped during the painting process. The goal is to end up with a clean and polished version of our original idea. Then we hang them and they all swim together in the halls...


... and that's Fish on Parade!

Art Club

Art Club at Iroquois School meets two days a cycle after school and is offered to 6th graders. We take old vinyl records and re-purpose them into clocks. The process starts with a blank record...
Then Mr. Perry adds a coat of white spray paint for a better surface to paint on...
Then students choose what to paint on them. Maybe a cartoon or comic character. Perhaps a favorite sports team, the possibilities are endless. Images are drawn on in pencil, then sharpie is used to outline the pencil. We use acrylic paint to add color. The atmosphere is set up like a studio where students hang with friends and work on art...is there anything better?


Once everything is painted, numbers are added using a template. A clock motor is installed through the hole in the record and VIOLA! Ready to hang!

Monday, October 24, 2011

Extreme Materials

Extreme Materials has opened at the Memorial Art Gallery. A different version of this show came to rochester in 2006 and featured artists working with found and recycled materials. A head stitched together and made out of orange peel, a flower made of pink high heel shoes, a sculptural sun made with carrots. This current exhibit expands on the first show and pushes the boundaries further. The creative solutions with odd and found objects is something for everyone to see.

Museum Hours: Wed-Sunday 11am-5pm, Thursday 11am-9pm
FAMILY DAY- Sunday November 20th, Noon-5pm. Cost- FREE!

More information is at The Memorial Art Gallery website : http://mag.rochester.edu/