"Show me that I'm everywhere and get me home for tea"

About a month or so ago, we had to take a trip to Liverpool to pick up Mrs M's passport before a work trip away. I did mean to write about it but one thing lead to another and It didn't quite happen. That afternoon got us talking about how Albert Dock would be perfect for one of our favourite past times and spurred on another visit which I am writing about at the moment, so I thought I should probably at least get some of the pictures up, to link the two posts together. We knew we were going to be there for a few hours so we visited the Tate and the Museum of Liverpool and despite feeling a little unwell myself it turned out to be a lovely afternoon.

Anyway I'll leave you with a few pictures...

 *Opeie was excited to see a Matisse exhibition on during the visit, after having an art week and covering Matisse during one of the days. It was adorable listening to him explain what Matisse was all about to Seth.

"The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal."

I am so behind with the posts I want to write as I am building something awesome with a friend of mine (all will be revealed next week). With our last post looking at Matisse and it being a bit of a flop with Opeie during our 'Art week', We asked Mrs M who our next artist should be and she decided on Wassily Kandinsky as she loved his pieces using circles. So we had a chat about it and decided to make an installation using anything we could find around the house that was circular. This instantly had Opeie motivated and a lot more interested than our previous day of art. 

Ive started yo-yoing recently as I loved it as a kid (I'm not very good but time will hopefully change that), so they were first for our collection along with plates, bowls, sticky tape, LEGO (of course) and all the lids we could find.

Opeie is loving disco lights and balls at the moment, so to add an a little more glamour to our piece we included Opeie's new Micro Scooter Wheel Whizzers, these things are awesome by the way but there will be more about those over the next few weeks.

With a huge pile of circles to play with we set about recreating our very own 'Circles in a circle'. 

Our Kandinsky exercise was great for teaching Opeie that with art there is no right or wrong way to do things. I love just leaving him to do his own thing and knowing that 'anything can be art' really gives him confidence in what he is doing.

Spending a morning playing with circles had Opeie looking around the house for other groups of circles. You can find art anywhere!

When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.

Well there was bound to be one day during our 'Art week' that Opeie wasn't all that bothered about, Cutting shapes out of a piece of coloured paper and sticking them down was never going to have the same appeal to a 4 year old as throwing paint around the garden but the whole idea of the week was to show Opeie some different art styles and to show that pretty much anything can be deemed as art.

Our artist of the day was Henri Matisse and his paper cut out style of art. We started with a piece of coloured/patterned paper, cut shapes out and flipped and mounted them on a larger piece of white paper making positive and negative shapes. It was a nice quick activity but as I said Opeie didn't really get in to today's art so I'm going to have to really think about something more entertaining for our next activity.

Our morning of Matisse ending in Opeie doing multi coloured scribbles and us creating a fox paper aeroplane so in the end a great start to a day of creativity.

"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.