In Which We Are Preparing for Our Annual Art Show . . .

This past month, all of our students have been preparing for our annual ART SHOW! 🙌 We arrived back on campus, as a full school, on April 7th. And I was told that we would not be having our regularly scheduled annual performance event. Instead, we would be organizing and planning a talent show that would be videoed for the school community to watch. In conjunction with the talent show, student art works would be hung in the gallery. Chances are, no one will be able to see any of the work that will be displayed. But, it will be nice for me to see this show come to light. And it will be fantastic closure to a very tough two years of teaching!

For the June 1^st opening, the upstairs art gallery will feature student works created about and inspired by the artworks of Henri Rousseau. 

Henri Rousseau was a French post-impressionist painter whose work exerted an extensive influence on several generations of avant-garde artists. He started painting in his 40’s and focused on paintings about imaginative jungle scenes from the rain forests in Africa. He never left France but visited botanical gardens on a regular basis to try and learn as much as he could about various species of plants. Mr. Rousseau’s paintings steadily rose to fame throughout the 1900’s with a large retrospective taking place between two museums in the mid-1980’s: in Paris at The Grand Palais and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Our student artworks will be on display from June 1^st throughout the remainder of the school year. Please find below images of the works in progress that Mr. Rousseau inspired in our students. Enjoy!

Nursery students focused on beautiful jungle birds in flight!

Kindergarten 1 students focused on recreating Mr. Rousseau's Traumgarten. 

Kindergarten 2 students also worked with tigers, but using a collage project designed by Deep Space Sparkle. 

My Grade 1 students looked at toucans and tropical flowers, creating a collage of their painted pieces on an acrylic background (not shown).

Grade 2 students combined monkeys and flowers and leaves . . . This is still a work in progress! Pictures forthcoming!

Grade 3/4 students celebrated the birth place of Mr. Rousseau by creating beautiful Eiffel Tower collages inspired by Deep Space Sparkle.

My bilingual Grade 5 students made fun rainforest frog paintings.

My Grade 5/6's were tasked with specific painting studies of some of Mr. Rousseau's most famous artworks.

My bilingual Grade 6 students were asked to imagine botanical landscapes, as this is how Mr. Rousseau dreamed up most of his artworks: walking through botanical gardens and studying the plants.

Like my Grade 5/6's, my bilingual Grade 7 students were tasked with specific painting studies of some of Mr. Rousseau's most famous artworks.

My Grade 7/8's created jungle bird studies with watercolor.

And, finally, my bilingual Grade 8 students will be creating a giant rendition of the famous painting: A Centennial of Independence. Originally created in 1892, this painting celebrates the 100th anniversary of the first French Republic. Peasants dance a popular southern French dance around three liberty trees. My students are using brown butcher paper to create each part of this painting at a larger-than-life size. Finished work coming soon!