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!
