Folk Art

Sewing theme

Chubby animals!

Use of two colors...

Love the size of these symbols

Christmas and nice job keeping simple shapes!

We were studying the terms primitive, naive, and folk artists and how these terms are used.  All have to do with an untrained artist with their work being very child-like.  Their perspective and proportions are usually off as well.  We were focusing on Grandma Moses and the amazing story of her success as such a late age in life, her late 70's. Students looked closely at her paintings and observed how much she painted like she stitched her embroidery work with blocks of separate colors. She has such charming work and I love how her paintings tell a story.

We discussed different forms of folk art and how it was often utilitarian in nature, such as weathervanes, decoys, quilts, etc.  We are working on a 'quilt' of our own and keeping the shapes simple in the style of folk artists.  Students are choosing a theme for their work and had to divide the paper into 16 squares.  Each square needs to have an image which took some time to draw.  We will be doing a border for these quilts next week and coloring in one or two colors of marker, focusing on alternating negative space and positive space.  Fun and cannot wait to see them completed!  I did this before with a class and we put them all together to make one big quilt, which is fun if you can leave them hanging on display in a classroom. More images of the complete work next week.