This year will definitely be a most memorable Great Artist year. Yes because it was different from all the rest and because this was also the last Great Artists for us graduating eighth graders. This year was also a different year for us because in the younger years, teachers would decide our artist for us. And in closer years, we would argue for days on what artist we wanted to do an not everyone would be happy. This year, we decided to skip all that fuss and go with something that made everyone happy; that you got to choose your own artist and portray their art anyway you wanted.
For my artist, I chose a abstract artist who’s name is Charlotte Wensley. People kept on asking me if I found her art by looking at a gallery a long time ago. But the truth of the matter is, I just found her because when I wanted an artist, and I knew that if I tried to do any like faces of people that I would mess it up. So i decided that the best way to not have to worry about that is just sticking with an absract artist. How I found her though, was just this simple way, I searched “Abstract Artists” on Google. Went to the first couple of pages. One of them had a long list of some artists with a picture of one of their paintings. And when I was scrolling through, I saw her art and it looked very interesting to me and decided I would want to re-create it. Also just sort of an interesting fact, was that when I was scrolling through I went by the artist that Trevor decided to do for his artist.
Charlotte Wensleys art was sort of an abstract landscape if anything. When she painted, she would sort of make these little hills and these sticks with circles on the top which I felt represented a tree or maybe even a person on the hill. My first thought when I saw this was it was a realistic landscape painting but then simplified down enough where you loose all detail like leaves or blades of grass and make it just sort of a blend. That’s what her artwork was, it wasn’t messy, it just transition from one color to the next. Like when I saw many of her paintings I thought that they looked like some people watching the sunset. Or that it was just someone looking up into the night and the sky would be blue-ish and then go to black and back.
When I first started once I started thinking about how I was actually going to paint this art, I figured out that I didn’t really have any experience blending colors or transitioning from one color to another. So that’s what I started with, just getting some blue and green paint and start with some paper and paint a little green then little by little add some blue to it till you find sort of a middle combination of both colors than did the same to other side but had blue and added some green. It was a very interesting process and was actually quite fun and figured out a lot about shading. I also tried making the shading go in sort of a circle where the outer part would be yellow then turn to sort of orange and then get red.
So how we set up our room this year was a little difficult. All the other classes had one artist and they could base their room on what their artist did like the Seventh Graders were doing Sister Corita Kent as their artist and they set their room up very colorfully because that is what she tended to do with her art. For us we just sort of set it up where we had most of the walls covered with black butcher paper and we just hung our art on there. We also had a few tables where some art was laid down and even Tati’s art was hanging from the ceiling.
Even though this was a completely different year because we each chose different artists and each did different amounts of art (Max created a lot of art where I only created a few paintings) but, in the end it all came together and looked great. I thought that it was a really good way to go out, with a bang and it definitely looked good.
