Lesson Plan Concepts - Pattern

As a part of year seven's Ocean Inspiration Scheme of.Work. I have been asked to find some artists from wider cultures in order to celebrate a wider range of cultures that engage in pattern. Children have expressed interest especially in artists that work tow dimensionally with colour, and have expressed that they would much rather work as a part of a group, rather than have the pressure to produce individual work.

In this blog post I hope to show my research and thought process throughout formulating an appropriate lesson plan and project idea.

Elizabeth Catlett

Website - https://www.moma.org/artists/1037

Her powerful work is well known. She is often an artist we look to when teaching our students about linocuts and block printing. While attending the University of Iowa, her painting teacher, Grant Wood, encouraged her to find inspiration from what she knew. As the granddaughter of slaves who raised her, the themes of slavery, Black culture, and women are often depicted in her work.

(Elizabeth Catlett. Sharecropper. 1952. Linoleum cut)

This is a fantastic artist who is proud of their 'black and mexican' heritage and presents challenging images to us that celebrate women in a very emboldening way. This may even be an important artist to look at this Black History month, which has a focus on strong black women. Her mark-making is detailed, but delicate and is used to great textural effect. The shape language is equally as strong and this work could certainly be shown to a class to encourage composition and texture while linocutting.

Benjie Torrado Cabrera

[No known website]

Cabrera is an artist from the Philippines who focuses his printmaking techniques on engraving. The engraving process that stemmed from the intaglio method is one that requires great attention to detail and time. The process of scratching into the metal plates allows for great detail and depth to occur within the pieces. Cabrera’s work is often representative of the cosmos symbolising the universe.

This artist engraves into metal, however, applying this to the classroom, I think that this would be fantastic inspiration for a lesson/activity around dry point etching. Layering different colours over each-other. This could be done by scratching into small A5 Sheets of Plexiglass and the brushwork at the top could be a means of distressing the canvas before printing.

Keith Haring

Website - https://www.haring.com/

1980s street art phenomenon Keith Haring became known for his graffiti tags of interlocking bodies that he would mark the black poster mounts in the New York City subways with. He soon created a recognisable set of images and symbols that he would repeat over and over again as enigmatic and colourful patterns, all across town in New York City as well as in his paintings and prints. Famous Haring themes are his line-drawn radiant babies, barking dogs and human figures. With the increase of his public recognition, Haring started creating large-scale murals that addressed political and societal issues, always using his personal iconography and the repetition of these symbols.

(Keith Haring, Tuttomondo mural (1989) at the church of Sant’Antonio Abate in Pisa, Italy)

Applying Haring to the classroom is certainly more approachable than other artists. His human forms are childishly creative in the best way, that makes his art engaging for young artists to imitate and copy. The style is instantly recognisable and truly fun. It's important to acknowledge, however, that he was a street artist. This means that all of his works are in situ and therefore the space the artwork is installed in carries a lot of meaning that can help to shape our understanding of the work. The iconic visual style is enigmatic, but his audiences have attempted to decode his visual language. One such example is the crawling figure, coined 'the baby'. This is said to represent the purest state of human existence, and so its installment within some darker places and neighbourhoods acts as a reminder of the importance of innocence and transforms the work into a protest for peace and care. Alternatively, this figure has been interpreted as a self portrait of the artist himself, showing us areas of his life that are 'darker' and that he struggles with.

In practice, we can apply his work by many different printing methods, I would say especially linocutting as the pronounced bold lines would make this process simpler for a younger class.

Additionally, this work would fit well to a group project, perhaps each student can think about poses of people that are important in their life/ of themselves and present them through this style.

Takashi Murakami

Website - https://gagosian.com/artists/takashi-murakami/

Japanese artist Murakami, the proponent of the innovative “Superflat” aesthetic, which combines classical Japanese art with contemporary Japanese pop culture. Murakami works consistently with the repetition of the same or similar patterns and symbols, all exploring the links between traditional printmaking techniques and Japanese anime and manga. His visual iconography consists of images of candy-coloured cartoon-like characters – smiling flowers, colourful mushrooms and creatures with bulging eyes popping out at the viewer to cause an overflow of colours and cuteness. His art challenges the boundaries between what is considered “high art” and “low art”, bringing the aesthetic of advertisements and cartoons into the high-end gallery and museum world. Murakami’s art of repetition extends perhaps the most of all the artists on this list to the world of consumerism through mass-produced items that he sells through his own company Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd. In this sense, the repetition of Murakami’s patterns is endless.

His themes are sometimes dark, and show the balance between the happiness presented by japanese culture and the darkness felt by the japanese people after WWII. His work is generally really happy, but because it's so positive, we can see this as the veil for grief.

We can see in some of his other works these darker themes, which may apply well to the classroom setting around Halloween. Looking at his large collections of similar images, we can see how easy it might be to create a collaborative project inspired by his work. In this piece, we can see this contrast between skulls that are coloured and skulls that are more monochromatic, it would be interesting to see what ideas we could come up with by introducing this as a task for a group activity in a school.

(Who's afraid of Red, Yellow, blue and death?. Takashi Murakami. 2010. Offset lithograph).

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