Paul Klee Artist Study

Ava and her Fish Magic painting

Second graders have spent the last several weeks studying the artist Paul Klee and how he created the vibrant colors and designs his paintings are know for. We looked at two paintings in particular to get our inspiration, which you can see after the break. 

The first piece we looked at was Fish Magic, painted in 1925. Its currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Students took inventory of all of the different elements that were present in the painting before trying to come up with an explanation of what they saw. Some thought it looked like a dream, some thought it was fish in outer space, and some thought it was a town seen through an aquarium on a window sill. We worked in our sketchbooks, practicing drawing lots of different sea creatures before we moved onto our final paintings. 

Our new painting technique was making smooth transitions from one color to another, You can see the effect in the seaweed in the bottom left corner. After we painted all of our sea life (and imaginative elements like houses and people), students filled the background in with black paint to make the colors really glow. 

This effect is called simultaneous contrast, but I told the kids they didn't have to remember that. Basically it means that colors look different depending on the colors that are around them. The next piece we looked at was on of Klee's abstract paintings, called Castle and Sun. 

Students who finished their Fish Magic paintings early created their own castles, using white oil pastel to make the outlines on black paper before filling the shapes in with vibrant colors. You can see the results of both of these projects in the hall by the main office.