The Fifth Grade Legacy Project is in the works!

     Fifth Grade students are currently in the process of creating a 10' panoramic mural of the Tappan Zee Bridge and the Hudson River south to north.  When it is finished it will be displayed for the "Moving-up" Ceremony and then permanently installed in Washington Irving School.  This project provides students a culminating activity in which to practice all the skills they have learned in their study of art here at W.I.

 

Let’s Go van Gogh! projects will be included in all student portfolios.  Portfolios are scheduled to go home the week of June 6th.

 

 

Let’s Go van Gogh!

Vincent van Gogh (born 1853- died 1890) was not well known during his lifetime, but today he is one of the most famous painters of all time.  He was born in Holland but after deciding to become an artist at 27, he spent most of his life in France.  Van Gogh discovered painting after he had tried and failed at other professions from art dealer to preacher.  All of van Gogh’s 800 or so paintings were created in the last ten years of his life. He tried to express his thoughts and emotions in his artwork, often working day and night without stopping, spending all of his money on paint, and even forgetting to eat.  Van Gogh’s paintings are filled with color, swirling images, and intense feelings.Van Gogh is known for his contrasting colors and his impasto style filled with hatch strokes and rolling, pulsing motions of his paintbrush. Van Gogh would stroke his paint onto the canvas with either a brush or a knife. 

      Third graders used oil pastels to create beautiful sunflowers in his honor.  We used dark, medium and light (value) to make our flowers look more three-dimensional.  We investigated the different textures of the sunflower and learned how we could apply the oil pastels in different ways to achieve different effects.  The background was done in water color wash.

      The fourth grade looked at van Gogh’s wheat field paintings that he did in the last years of his life. Then they sketched their own wheat fields onto pastel paper and used oil pastels to build delicate landscapes comprised of a broad variety of colored lines.    

      The Starry Night is one of the most well known images in modern culture.   There is the night sky filled with swirling clouds, stars ablaze with their own luminescence, and a bright crescent moon. Although the features are exaggerated, this is a scene we can all relate to. This sky keeps the viewer's eyes moving about the painting, following the curves and creating a visual dot to dot with the stars.

     Van Gogh went from Impressionism to inspiring the next generation of artists:  the Expressionists and the Fauves.  Van Gogh’s painting can be seen in New York City at MOMA.  Fifth grade artists learned how to make “van Gogh marks” and each interpreted The Starry Night in their own way.