Art Appreciation ~ Cezanne Fruit Still Life

This week we started our study of Cezanne, a famous Post-Impressionist artist.

As this was our introduction lesson,we read Cezanne’s biography.  (During our next lesson we’ll revise his life story and the children write a narration of his biography on our Famous Impressionist Biography pages.)

I found a video showing about 5 minutes of his works with pleasant background music at Ambient Art – Cezanne.

For this week’s art lesson we chose to focus on Cezanne’s fruit still life paintings.  (Next week I think we will study his landscapes …)

Cezanne described the shapes that he found in nature as cubes, cones, cylinders and spheres.

We looked at how to shade a sphere at Learn To Art,  and we found this picture at www.artinstructionblog.com showing the highlights and shadows very helpful:

We found this wonderful example of how to draw fruit using coloured pencils at www.painters-online.co.uk:

And there was An Easy Beginner Drawing Lesson showing how to do a pencil sketch of a pear at drawsketch.about.com

Now we were ready to draw.

Miss.L decided to sketch and colour the painting of Glass and Pears which we had in our book Impressionist Painters by Guy Jennings.  She needed a little help with her contour lines, on the first few pears, but quickly got the hang of shading with 3 different shades of each colour.  She started with the lightest colour, then the middle shade and then completed each fruit with the darkest colour at the edges, and created shadows.

Inspiration and Sketch

Glass and Pears by Miss.L (nearly 8 yrs)

Miss.K and I sketched the apple still life I set up to resemble Cezanne’s Apples and Oranges (except I didn’t have any oranges.)  She quickly mastered the shading technique we studied, and her apples turned out very well.  I spent at least an hour longer on my sketch and thoroughly enjoyed my art time.

Still Life and sketch

Apple Still Life by Miss.K (10 yrs)

And this is the sketch I completed:

Nadene's Still Life

I hope to do a few more Cezanne picture studies in the next weeks.  We have our Famous Impressionist Lapbook minibooks printed and we will use the Cezanne’s minibook to conclude our Cezanne study.

What Cezanne activities have you and your children enjoyed?

(PS: I have updated all the references and links as the orignal links no longer worked.)