O'Keeffe-scapes

Georgia O’Keeffe was a ground breaking artist in the early – mid 1900’s.

She is best known for her up-close paintings of flowers.  … So close, sometimes, that her subjects tended to look abstract and beautiful in form, value and color.

This idea of beauty carried over into anything she made including her paintings of bones.  Bones are not generally thought to be beautiful but O’Keeffe was able to share her perspective with anyone that would take notice to her art work. 

In this project, we observed bones and used a viewfinder to select an interesting composition.  We also did a lot of experimenting with value.  While we warmed up using graphite to create different values, we journeyed to using charcoal (a material that O’Keeffe used in her early art works).  The journey included the discovery of patience + practice = results.  What started as a simple moving line on paper transformed into a 3-dimensional form.  Color was later added in the negative space to add contrast and give the illusion of space. 

 Take a look at all that we did.

 I think 6th graders did fabulous, but it wasn't until I read their artist statements that I discovered what was going on inside those deeply focused heads.  ... and it helps to know that they enjoyed the challenge too.

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