Anatomy of an Art Project

Summer Camp July 2010 Update:

There is still space in week 1 and 4. Scroll down for more information

Magritte- Inspired Magazine Collage 4/28

As for all projects I poke around for inspiration suited to the group at hand. My class of students from Gr5- Gr7 had just finished transforming a clementine box into some kind of assemblage and the Surrealists were one inspiration. I like Magritte' s paintings as an invitation to play with scale and strange pairings of objects. So we continued with his ideas of inside and outside being mixed up, physics being defied to create crazy dream-like environments. This time we used magazine images and other paper on a background of watercolour wash. The magazines are very attractive because they scream popular culture, sometimes it's a challenge to remember we are making collages and not just cutting out all the images we like. That is where Magritte helped us focus on choosing images that, together, would make a whole that surprised, raised a question, presented a mystery. Any kind of cut paper exercise is great for allowing time for composing elements on the page. Composition is a combination of a few rules and a lot of intuition. One teacher I had in a life drawing class said good composition is being intentional(I'm not sure this is a complete definition) So we spent two classes on this project.

1Looked at images of Magritte's pantings and cut from magazines, forming seeds of ideas

2Painting backgrounds suited to our plan, drying them and arranging and finding more images

3Gluing! (finally)