Have you ever wished that you are one of the Master Artists?
Learning from artworks is a way to bring Art to our students in an engaging manner. Students will be exposed to a range of artworks by local and international artists. They shall understand these artists through their artworks and come to realise how they, as individuals or as collaborators, create artworks to convey their messages. Students shall emulate these master artists and try to follow their footsteps to create artworks of their own.
Vincent Van Gogh………
Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who subsequently became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history.
The Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village.
Cheong Soo Pieng………
Cheong Soo Pieng was a Singaporean artist who was a pioneer of the Nanyang art style, and a driving force to the development of Modernism in visual art in the early 20th-century Singapore. His artworks are largely influenced by cultural traditions. He took interest in recreating the scenes he saw and experienced in the 1970s.
In “Drying Salted Fish”, Cheong Soo Pieng is engaging the viewer’s senses to be able to relate to the scene he was part of. Have a sniff and smell the salty tang in the air and listen to the womenfolk as they speak amongst themselves as if you were standing at the bustling market. This iconic painting can also be found on the Singapore fifty-dollar note.
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky………
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. He began to learn Art seriously at the age of 30. He is generally regarded as one of the pioneers of abstraction in Western Art.
Wassily Kandinsky who had been fascinated with colours since an early age created an oil painting, Composition VIII, in the Abstract style. This artwork consists of circles, grids, rectangles, semicircles, triangles, other mathematical forms, colours, straight and curved lines set against a background of cream that melds at certain points into areas of pale blue. He wished to explore an interrelation between sound and colour similar to how a musician composes a song.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo………
Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books. He liked to add humor and comedy to his artwork by surprising people with his creative use of daily objects.
Vertumnus is an oil painting produced by Giuseppe Arcimboldo in 1591 that consists of multiple fruits, vegetables and flowers that come together to create a portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II re-imagined as Vertumnus, the Roman god of nature and life. The fruits and vegetables represent a good harvest during the Golden Age of the Emperor’s rule.
Tan Jun Sheng………
Tan Jun Sheng likes to explore materiality and the use of colour. In his hands, materials are used in artworks to express our feelings, thoughts, and observations. Through his choice of materials, he attempts to convey key messages such as awareness of our environment and the resources we use within it.
My Confident Self (2013) is a self-portrait expressing the student’s self-confidence and reflects his experience as an actor appearing on TV for the very first time.
The colourful buttons represent his cheerful personality and how he enjoys using everyday objects like buttons in his art making.
Salvador Dalí………
Salvador Dalí was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work. Surrealism is an exploration of thought where the artist creates unreal images that do not exist in this world and can only belong in our imagination.
Salvador Dalí describes his paintings as “Hand painted dream photographs”, where his paintings mainly inspired from his dreams. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931, and is one of the most famous Surrealist paintings. It was inspired from eating melted cheese. It is also said that it is a self-portrait painting of himself.
Teo Eng Seng………
Teo Eng Seng was a recipient of the Cultural Medallion in 1986 for his contributions to visual arts. In 1960, The Singapore Free Press described Teo Eng Seng as “a youth who holds the record of being the first schoolboy in Singapore to hold a one-man art exhibition”. His invention of the paperdyesculp as a medium was rank as one of the most significant achievements of second-generation artists in Singapore. His earliest works of the 1960s and 1970s had portrayed art as a form of a social statement.
The Net is a hanging sculpture made up of “trash” from the Singapore River. It is a depiction of the state of Singapore River in the 1970's, when it suffered from severe pollution. The different shapes represent the different types of rubbish collected when the water was cleaned.
His artwork engages the “Great Singapore River Debate” of the 1970s and 80s, where Singaporean artists were criticised for their overuse of the River as a subject matter.
Kuo Chuan Presbyterian Primary School………
Artist statement:
“Everyone is blaming each other for the spilled paint.
When the teacher arrives at the Art Studio, all four immediately pointed at each other and exclaimed, “It’s not me!”
However, someone has to own up sooner or later.”
This painting was submitted under the “Emotion” category for the Singapore Youth Festival (SYF) 2013 Art Exhibition.
“Happiness, anger or confusion… How does a work of art make us feel?
In making art, we draw upon our emotions to convey our feelings. Our full range of emotions thus forms a rich palette from which we draw from to bring colours to the works we create.
We only need to look within ourselves to feel what we see and create what we feel. Afterall, a work of art is good not because it looks like something, but rather because it feels like something.
Oscar-Claude Monet ………
Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter. He loved to draw as a child and was even able to make some money drawing caricatures of people. He was also one of the unwavering believers of the Impressionism movement.
Water Lilies ( 1916 ), depicts Monet’s flower garden, at his home in Giverny. He painted water lilies in all seasons and in all weathers for over 30 years. The paintings captivate the serene beauty of nature, immersing viewers in a tranquil realm of floating blossoms and shimmering reflections.
Vincete Delgato ………
Vincete Delgato is born in Madrid, Spain. Vicente’s (or more affectionately known as Tito by his family and friends) practice focuses on general image-making and cultural communication. He loves to incorporate a diverse range of image-making techniques and enjoys working on fun projects that encompass evoking yet symbolic communicative responses.
We are Family ( 2014 ) is an artwork done by Vincete Delgato and it is inspired by Singapore’s Multiculturalism. It is made of many different soft cushions put together to form a large artwork. This artwork is an interactive artwork, which invites the audience to arrange the pieces in different configurations allowing them to also interact with one another.