Artist du jour: Loretta Lux

My friend Joseph introduced me today to the wonderful art of Loretta Lux. We saw her portrait of a boy at the SF Moma and browsed through a book of her photographs. Her depiction of children has always a strange and lonely quality, always beautifully composed. There is a very painterly quality of her choice of colors and set up, reminiscent of Renaissance paintings. Some of the vintage clothes the children wear were saved from her childhood by her mother.
The portraits of these children are haunting and sweet, ready to tell a fairy tale of strange adventures - I just can't stop looking at them and wondering..

Shrinky Dinks Art Project

I had the good fortune to teach some art lessons in my daughter's 6th grade class. I started off the series of lessons with a talk entitled "Warning! You may have art in your home that you are not aware of". I tried to communicate that art and design are all around us and that we often don't realize how much of our world is art and design - from the chair we sit on to the clothes we wear and the magazines we read. Middle school kids often connect with the term art only the "boring" paintings in museums or consider making art a "childish" past time that they did when they were little. To get them interested again in making art I brought in different "art" objects: a photograph, an iPod, a skate board with graffiti, a tie-dye rock t-shirt and more. we talked about how all these objects have a deliberate visual language applied to them. in the following two lessons we practiced drawing perspective. The last lesson we made our own key ring charms by drawing on Shrinky Dinks plasic material which shrinks when baked. Here are some samples that my daughter and I had prepared for the lesson.