Paper Birds
The RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch takes place this weekend, an annual event that sees hundreds of thousands of nature lovers build a picture of how garden birds are faring in our own back yards. So, in The Art Room this week we took inspiration from our feathered friends and set about building our own bird-themed pictures by drawing, not from what we could spot through the window, but from the shapes of art history and the striking paper Cut-Outs of French artist Henri Matisse.
We started our session by sharing the story book ‘Matisse’s Garden’ and learnt that when Matisse got older and was unable to paint the way he used to, he created artworks in a brand-new way by arranging big, bold organic shapes and simple forms, cut with scissors from white pieces of paper, onto the walls of his studio. Looking at Polynesia, The Sky, a large blue and white collage made by Matisse in 1946 and inspired by memories of his visit to Tahiti many years before, we saw how he captured the soaring and swooping sensation of the many birds he recalled gliding through his memories.
Matisse referred to his practice as ‘drawing with scissors’; he cut his shapes free-hand without drawing them first with a pencil. To extend our own investigations into drawing we asked the children to create an artwork in the style of Matisse and, using a pair of scissors like a drawing tool, think about every snip being like a line on a page. To help start them off, the children used a ‘Roll and Create’ game sheet to guide their cutting and snipping. Each simple bird design was selected from a numbered grid that corresponded to the number rolled on a dice. We loved the way the children persevered with this process and, although tricky at first, they soon discovered that something surprising could be created with every new cut. Mistakes and imperfect lines could be snipped again to form new shapes and even the scraps and paper off-cuts could be re-imagined into something new.
By the end of the session the children were confidently cutting their own organic shapes and adding details of their choice to personalise their paper birds. To complete the activity, everyone painted bold, blue washes onto large sheets of paper and, once dry, transformed them into vibrant sky backdrops against which to arrange and showcase their beautiful creations and striking final designs. The Art Room was filled with playful creativity this week and it was wonderful to see how, with freedom to experiment, the children’s imaginations soared!
