Main Street School of the Arts

Mike Bernard (1957-) is an English painter. His highly textured semi-abstract paintings are often executed in mixed media and brings an experimental approach to painting. He paints with cardboard pieces along with paint brushes. "I enjoy the way textures, shapes, color and ‘happy accidents’ steer the direction of my paintings," he says. This week we painted with cardboard and joked that cardboard is made from trees, but with this project TREES are made from cardboard!

Although Christmas trees first appeared in America in the 1700s, the emergence of the modern Christmas tree actually dates back to 15th and 16th century Germany. Evergreens were used first in church plays at Christmas and were hung with apples to symbolize a Paradise tree. Paradise trees later found their way into homes, where they were adorned with small white wafers, and later, small pastries cut into stars, angels, hearts and flowers. Decorated trees were brought to Americ...a by German mercenaries fighting in the Revolutionary War. Christmas wasn't widely celebrated in the United States until the 1800s. As a result, decorated trees did not become widely popular until people saw the ornaments brought to America by German immigrants in the 1840s. This week we designed and decorated our very own ornaments! Merry Christmas!!!!

This week we studied "Sky and Water I" by M.C. Escher (1898 1972) and how he played around with positive and negative space. The imagery consists of the juxtaposition of birds and fish (flying/swimming, black/white, yin/yang, the black negative water space of the fish morphing into the birds/the white negative air space of the birds morphing into the fish.) With this week’s project we traced multiple shapes, overlapping them and coloring in the positive and negative spaces that were created...transforming our art!

Monochromatic color schemes are derived with one color and then mixing shades, tones and tints using black and white. As a result, the energy is more subtle and peaceful due to a lack of contrast of hue. Pablo Picasso's Blue Period, in which he painted only blue paintings of sad subject matter, is a good example of how an artist used color to reflect his feelings. This week we painted monochromatic portraits!

Jacek Yerka (born 1952) from Poland is one of the premier artists of the "New Weird" movement among the cutting-edge surreal artists. As a child, Yerka loved to draw and make sculptures. He hated playing outside, and preferred to sit down with a pencil, creating and exploring his own world. Yerka was bullied as a child but later became 'untouchable' in his high school due to his clever sketches of the school's worst bullies. This week we created silly surreal sentences and then drew them! Basically sums up 2020!

Thomas Hart Benton (18891975) declared himself an "enemy of modernism"; he began the naturalistic and representational work today known as Regionalism. Regionalism refers to a naturalist style of painting and other works of art of the 1920s through the 1950s in the United States depicting American urban and rural scenes. During the 1930s, these artists documented and depicted American cities, small towns, and rural landscapes; some did so as a way to return to a simpler time away from industrialization. This week we incorporated multiple horizon lines in our landscapes!