Actually there were two but one of them kept moving out of the way thinking I wanted a photo of Casa Batllo.
Bobble Hats of Barcelona
People
Picasso now
This week we are ‘doing’ Picasso in the summer school. It neatly fits in with the circus activities as Picasso often painted clowns and travelling circus people in his early work.
Before I write about the art work I just want to say what fun it was to do an introductory clown class. We had to imagine our eyes on the ends of our noses and walk around the room, looking with our noses. It makes a huge difference to how you walk!
Then we walked one by one across the room, as normally as you can when a group of children are watching you. After deciding what stood out most about our way of walking, we then copied and exaggerated it. This class only lasted about 10 minutes as the group was suffering from an attack of Attention Deficit Syndrome but I could have done it all day.
We tried out doing Picasso portraits of each other. If you fancy playing around with this I also found a great web site where you can make Picasso Heads.
The Miro Show
This weeks work on Miro culminated with a show of paintings, costumes, dance, songs and theatre.
It was beautiful!
We had looked at Miros paintings and picked out some of the themes – his use of earthy colours and strong reds, blacks, and yellows. The basic recurring images of suns, birds, stars, the moon, and abstract lines and points which remind you of dreams and night time imaginings.
The day of the show was exciting. Somehow it all came together.
One of the boys wanted to paint a spider – he made it a huge one with big furry legs and we cut it out of cardboard and painted it black and red. He wore a black cape and had his face painted with a web design. His part in the show is to enter Miro’s dream and crawl around the floor, scaring the audience, tickling the feet of the sleeping artist and then finally enter the picture that is created at the end when they all stood together making a picture of their own.
Another girl, often a little shy, chose to paint eyes. The One who Looks. She came on stage so proud and confident that I almost cried. She danced with her cardboard eyes attached to her head and hands, looking at all the other images.
The smallest one – aged 5 – had chosen to paint the sun so she wore orange and red, face painted with hot colours and carrying a beautiful sun. In rehearsal she was a little overwhelmed but at the show she stumbled on entering the stage and almost fell. This made her laugh and she carried on with her dance in such a funny smiling giggly way that everyone relaxed and she really was the Sun giving warmth.
I love seeing the faces light up with excitement, watching how those who were nervous find confidence, seeing them do things they at first said ‘No Puc!’ (I can’t)
Me too – I did things I thought ‘No Puc’ and hopefully my face too brightened when it went alright.