Spring Session 2011- Week Four

Marc Chagall & Dream Clouds

Dreams are wonderful, scary, frightening, beautiful, ethereal, ghostly, colorful, honest, unrealistic, realistic, and so completely creative. Taking inspiration from the artist this week, Marc Chagall. His painting truly capture dreams and dreamlike qualities. We introduced the kids to Marc Chagall's paintings this week looking at his use of color and subjects in his paintings. Here is a brief background on Mr. Chagall that we shared with the children.

Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk, Belorussia, Russian Empire [now in Belarus] in 1887 - the oldest of nine children. His father worked in a herring factory and his mother sold spices and herring out of a small shop in their home. As a child he studied drawing and painting and in 1910 he went to Paris and became an artist. Chagall often painted dreamlike scenes and many of the pictures he painted include memories from his childhood. In addition to paintings, Marc created stage sets, stained glass, murals and costumes, as well as illustrations for children's' books. Written by Andrea Mulder-Slater, KinderArt®

Marc Chagall's "I and The Village" painting was our source of inspiration this week. They started out by sketching an "X" across the entire sheet of paper. The children next were to draw a profile of a person on one side, and a profile of an animal/creature on the opposite side. In the corresponding areas the kids were to draw something the person dreams about, and in the last section something the animal dreams about. We had them use crayons this time for the assignment and encouraged them to fill in the entire "canvas". We tried to keep our "guidelines" to a minimum so they could really create their own dreamlike picture. Once they were finished we helped them mount their creation on solid color paper, and had them title, date, and sign their artwork.










Our second project was a dream cloud created out of paper, cotton balls, and yarn. To use as a mobile to hang in their rooms. We had some punches available to use, but we also let children create their own images that would hang down off of their dream cloud. They turned out really cute.