Continuing our History of Art project with the Post-Impressionists, we turned to Cezanne. I particularly drew the boys’ attention towards his non-naturalistic use of colour, his use of bold outlining of figures and objects and his approach to still life. I was particularly keen that the kids have a go at drawing a still life but we also looked at The Bathers and The Card Players. In the end, two plumped for still life and the other two chose to take their cue from the latter paintings. And I am still losing my battle with getting them to explore different media, especially wet media.
I think largely because he was looking for something he could transform into Minecraft, my oldest chose to work from The Card Players. He used coloured pencil. Yet again. But at least his insistence on replicating a painting meant that he was paying close attention to all the detail. I need to encourage him to work bigger, however, as this was a very small drawing.
My 8 year old was in a “minimal application” frame of mind. He was like a grizzly bear. I, therefore, decided not to push his buttons and try to persuade him to try adding colour when he drew a line drawing of various sea creatures. Apparently inspired by The Bathers, it looked more like a casting call for Adventure Time. The hashtag is a family in joke because my youngest brother’s nickname is Octopus and we all take photos of any octopus things we find to tag him as on Facebook.
My 9 year old and 6 year old did decide to take me up on the idea of a still life. They scurried off to collect objects to organise so they could draw them as a group. The youngest chose a handful of his Gogo toys and the 9 year old chose an Iron Man mask, his Iron Man Disney Infinity figure and a rubber spider. Despite rushing, the 9 year old did a pretty good job of producing a still life sketch. The 6 year old, however, found it a real struggle and was not happy with his outcome so asked me not to share his drawing.
I decided not to work in a Cezanne style and instead to take my cue from the subject matter of The Bathers. I need practice with rendering water with watercolour paint so I decided to draw a female figure floating on the surface of a pool. I had a hard time getting the paint to look remotely like water but finally, after many glazes of watercolour and after almost chucking the whole thing, I finally got an effect I could be content with.
You can, as always, see my Cezanne inspired Crazy Critter over on my other blog.
A Pict in PA 