Paul Gauguin

I read a short biography from Garden of Praise and some extracts from my book Impressionist Painters.

We looked at a selection of his art works. He is most famous for the simple, yet colourful style he used once he lived in Tahiti and enjoyed the Polynesian island lifestyle.

(Just a note: I only made slight references to Gauguin’s troubled and dissipated lifestyle and we did not include any nude paintings in our review.)

We watched a lovely slideshow of his works.

We put up our picture of Gauguin and his gallery of paintings on our wall chart.

The children wrote some biographical information on our biography pages. They cut out and pasted the Gauguin thumbnail paintings on their minibook and pasted this on their biography notebook page.

As Charlotte Mason suggested, we will study Gauguin for a month. Each week we will focus on a new painting and do an art appreciation lesson. This may just be a detailed oral narration of what they remember in a painting once they have sat quietly and looked at it. Or they may write a detailed description of a painting. Or we may create a copy of a masterpiece, we may use a similar technique in our work. Not every lesson is an art lesson!

This week we copied ~

M. Loulou

I printed out the simple and colourful work. I wanted the girls to copy the painting with a grid.

We drew a simple 4 x 4 grid across the picture.

I then pencilled in a similar 4 x 4 grid on our drawing paper.

We outlined the main features of the picture, using the grid as our guidelines, comparing lines and distances square by square.

Here and there we all realized that without the grid we would have mistaken the proportions.

After a short while, we were ready to colour our pictures.

Miss. K and I both painted our picture, while Miss. L used watercolour pencils and washed over her picture with water to get the paint effect she wanted.