Wednesday 3 February 2016

"To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect."


Continuing our week of art and with yesterday's Jackson Pollock paint flicking activity in the garden going so well, we moved on to a new artist with a completely different artistic medium. Alexander Calder was our artist of today and Opeie was looking forward to having some of his creations suspended from the ceiling.


We started by drawing some obscure shapes on different coloured sheets of paper. Then our friends Sam and Jamie visited, so Sam joined in and helped. We cut the shapes out and using transparent cord made a hole in each shape and thread it through. We used 3 straws and tied one of our shapes to each of the 6th ends. Our creation was really droopy which was great as it gave me a chance to explain balance to Opeie and how we shift the weight along the straw to suspend the piece evenly.


The end result was really effective and it was great seeing Opeie's art delicately sway as we opened doors or passed by. It was an important lesson for Opeie in art as he understands more now that art can be created in many forms. We'll definitely be doing this again when Opeie is a little older using wire or metal rods and shapes made of different materials. Calder's other works include wire sculptures which we will also be attempting at some point soon. 

Tomorrows artist in our week of art will be Henri Matisse so stay tuned.



1 comment:

Jamie said...

Totally awesome!