Wonderful Wednesday #3: Henri Matisse

This week, we focused on learning about French painter, Henri Matisse. To start our day, we played in the garden. And since we had so much rain last night, water play started early.

After our fun in the garden, we came in to have snack. Today, we had roll-ups with cheese, blueberries and watermelon. The children loved using cookie cutters to make shapes with their cheese and roll-ups!

Once we were done with our snack, we moved on to talking about Matisse. Did you know that he started painting when he was sick one day at home? His mother was trying to keep him busy and it turned into his career! He painted in many different places and enjoyed painting people.

Our first art project was Fauve based. Fauvism was a movement of a group of artists with similar ideas and loved to paint landscapes, in particular, using colors much different from how they really appeared. So, on one side of our paper, we painted a tree as we might see it outside with a brown trunk and green leaves. On the other side of the paper, we painted the same tree with wildly vibrant colors--some chose to make the trunk orange and the leaves purple!

Our second art project is a personal favorite! I love the "Snail" print by Matisse. At first glance, it looks like a lovely collage, but if you look closer there is a little surprise! In the top left corner is a very tiny purple snail! And the print itself has a spiral feel, just like the spiral of a snail shell.

Matisse created "The Snail" as one of his last art prints when he was over 80 years old. He was not feeling well enough to paint, but did feel well enough to cut shapes out of paper and arrange them into new designs. He called it "drawing with scissors" and this is where modern day collage stemmed from.

Here are some of the snails made by the toddlers!

Then, it was time to go outside for water play! We were very grateful that the sun came out just long enough for us to play.

Hmmm, where's the water?

See you next Wednesday!!