Klee

For our second week of Neutron Art, we studied Paul Klee. We learned that Paul Klee was gifted and had two choose between two loves: music and art. He came from a musical family, but also loved art.
Klee used arrows and birds to show movement within his paintings to move the eyes of the audience. We first noticed this technique of movement in his painting, Birds Swooping Down and Arrows. We searched his later paintings for this technique. During his lifetime, he created about 8,000 paintings. When we studied Senecio, we observed how one eyebrow was an arrow and an example of how Klee used movement to direct our gaze clockwise around the painting. A photograph of his studio displayed Klee as well as the paintings that we were studying. Finally, in the painting, Tree of Houses, we observed a tree house that we would have enjoyed playing in. This painting directed our eyes up with arrows and then back down again with birds. We discussed how Klee used texture and painted on burlap and then searched the room for rough textures that he also might have used.
We continued our sketchbook and practiced his techniques and created abstract images of birds, houses, and fish. We drew examples of still objects and then moving objects. Our final project was a landscape where we added pattern and movement in the style of Paul Klee.
(I am taking the information from the Meet the Masters program that we have enjoyed with my family.)