Appreciating Cezanne’s Cubist Landscapes

We have continued studying Cezanne’s work the past few weeks and this week we looked at his landscapes.

He painted most of his landscapes in a cubism style.

We examined how the artist broke areas of the picture into geometric shapes and used line and colour to create different planes of colour on his objects and spaces.  We looked at our Art Era Timeline and found Cubism and looked at the other art from that art movement.  I created the Art Era Timelines for this reason ~ I want my children to identify the style and the art movement.  With frequent exposure to art this way, I trust that they will start to name the art styles and movements when they see similar art. We used dry-wipe markers and wrote Cezanne and Cubism on our wall chart timeline.

We reviewed his works on a slide show ~ Ambient Art – Cezanne.  Many pictures are ‘familiar’ and we recognised many of Cezanne’s famous apple and orange still lives. We also looked at another Cezanne slide show on Garden Of Praise.com. Then we studied our picture for this week from our Impressionist Painters book by Guy Jennings  ~ Landscape with Rocks and Trees.

I prepared an outline sketch for this lesson.

It is such a help to have the outlines drawn if we need to focus on detailed techniques.  (I simply trace over the picture from our coffee table book, go over it with a black fineliner, then scan and enlarge the image.) The right hand side of this outline features cubist lines which Cezanne painted, but I excluded these guidelines on the left hand side of the picture. Although all our art is similar, you will notice we used different shapes, colours, textures and mediums and our pictures have their unique qualities. This type of art is not interpretive, but technical.

You may download your outline drawing here ~ Cezanne Landscape outline for cubism

The girls used water-colour pencils.  They hatched little lines in an amazing array of colours they saw in the original painting. Then they painted over their pencils with water.

My youngest became frustrated with lack of progress using the cubist technique and she turned to my oil pastels.  I found they worked so well.  I had covered areas with deep layers of oil pastels.  Eventually we were all colouring the page with the pastels.

Miss.L's landscape

Miss.K's Landscape

And this is our artwork for our gallery!