Thursday, March 13, 2014

Gustav Klimt

Our 5th grade artists are busy finishing their Klimt-inspired portraits.
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was a symbolist painter who very popular during his own life time and continues to be popular today.  You might be familiar with his works "The Kiss" or "The Tree of Life".  He was not only a portrait artist, but a symbolist painter.  Klimt combined these two very different generas into the same paintings, usually by painting very realistic faces, hands and arms, combined with abstracted, symbol-rich garments and backgrounds.

Our 5th grade artists began this project by learning the basic proportions of the human face (a very technical process!) and combined that with clothing and backgrounds filled with symbols and patterns significant to them.  The paintings were completed with water color and finally adorned with gold paint- a nod to Klimt's "Golden Phase".  Here are a few works in progress:

No comments:

Post a Comment