In The Paint

Ok, this post is about art and my trip to Ottawa. The purpose of this trip was to visit the National Gallery to see the exhibition Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome. This was a great exhibition although a little overwhelming. My hubby and I decided to get the audio guides which we did not enjoy. We felt that the narrator was just describing the paintings without much information about the artist and the technique.

My favourite part of the exhibition was the area that had three or four paintings of Judith with the head of Holophernes. This included the painting by Artemesia Gentileschi, which I looked at and discussed with my grade 8s last year.

I don’t have any photos of the NG but I have photos of some other art that we found around the city: have I mentioned that I’m also a history teacher?

Here is Nelly McClung fighting for women’s suffrage:

Queen Elizabeth II:

Joseph Brandt:

The coolest place we went was the Diefenbunker. This is a cold war bunker turned museum that was created to shelter the government should a nuclear weapon hit Ottawa.

On a sadder note, we heard the news that Jack Layton, Leader of the Opposition, passed away just a couple of hours before we went to spend the day on Parliament Hill. Below is the beginning of a pile of flowers and tributes for him as well as the Peace Tower with the flag at half-mast. It was an emotional day.

So camp is over now but I wanted to share a few of the projects I’ve done with the kids over the last four weeks. During this time I was working 8-10 year olds.
The first pieces are the bird soft sculptures. The kids loved this! They loved sewing and wanted to do more.

This group was excited about everything we did. The next activity was a wire tree sculpture. (Thanks Liz for the idea!)
We used 20 gauge wire to create the trunk, roots, and branches. We then attached it to a piece of foam board with clay. Some of the kids got creative with this and went up the trunk with clay or made little birds or squirrels to put into the branches.
Then we took thinner, coloured wire and curled and wrapped it around the branches to make leaves. Here are the results:

In another class the kids did silkscreen silhouettes. We did a photo shoot for two projects and the kids took turns taking photos of each other. For one project they were making funny faces or hamming it up for the camera while for the silkscreen project they shot each other in profile.
We then printed a rectangle of one colour and then their silhouette in another colour.

We also did one version where we collaged onto the paper before the last step so that image would be about them and their interests. I didn’t like the final look of that.

For these last two projects, I found I had to simplify the steps for this group. They were not as “in to it” as other groups and their attention was difficult to keep. We also did silkscreen, but onto tote bags. And to add sculpture to the mix we learned how to draw dinosaurs and then sculpted one out of plasticene.

Well, those were some of my favourite art projects from the last few weeks (or the ones that I took pictures of.)

Saturday night was the opening of AWOL’s Square Foot Show. This was my first time participating or even attending and I was impressed with the overall quality of the work. It’s a non-juried show and the accepts 500 artists to show one to three works of art.

This is what the walls looked like:

It was a very busy and warm in the space so we walked out in the rain looking for cold drinks afterwards. It took us a while but ended up at Ossington and Dundas in a classic diner called Lakeview Restaurant. The atmosphere was great as was the food. I had a banana smoothie, and my husband had a shepherd’s pie.