Elizabeth Murray

This was a fun little lesson my long term substitute did on artist Elizabeth Murray. Murray is a painter who used bright, bold colors, and interesting shapes. Murray’s distinctively shaped canvases break with the art-historical tradition of illusionistic space in two-dimensions. Jutting out from the wall and sculptural in form, Murray’s paintings and watercolors playfully blur the line between the painting as an object and the painting as a space for depicting objects.

Ani Hoover

Ani Hoover is a contemporary artist from St. Joseph, Missouri who now resides and works out of Buffalo, NY. Influenced by the impressionistic work of Vincent Van Gogh, she has cultivated a body of work all about color. The fourth grade students looked at her work and discussed what it could mean. How do the colors make you feel? How would you feel if you were as crowded as the circles? What do you see? They looked at the repeating circles in her paintings and learned about concentric circles. Painting their own concentric circles, they were arranged as one large collaborative piece.

Doodle Quest

Recently I was asked to review a game called "Doodle Quest." On a "ketchup" day with my 4th graders, the students who were all caught up with their work were able to try the game out for me. They loved it!