Basquiat Self Portraits with Free Association Elements

Basquiat

Basquiat

You either love or hate Jean-Michel Basquiat (Haiti 1960-New York City 1988). Our featured artist grew up in Brooklyn and began his career as a street and graffiti artist in the streets of NY. He became good friends with Andy Warhol, who supported his artistic endeavors. His art makes political, personal and social statements, often using free association texts, drawings and statements. Basquiat died of a drug overdose when he was 27. Sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing, his art is every bit as fun as it is heavy. 

Our little class (6-7 yrs olds) beautifully channeled Basquiat in their self-portraits with free-association elements. Take a close look and get inside the complex minds of our littlest artists. Our older kids, upwards of 7, had a harder time 'letting go'. To help them make personal 'free', 'spontaneous' connections to their portraits, we quickly brainstormed by jotting down some words on paper and drawing images to go along with our words. This helped build the foundation for our free association elements we'd add later around our portraits. 
The paper we used for this project was brown packaging paper, which had served as place mats for previous painting lessons, so it already had random streaks of color and scribbles on it. A great starting point for a Basquiat piece! I cut the large painted paper sheets into 30x40cm sizes, and let the kids choose one they liked.  
I encouraged the kids to think of their self-portraits as very abstract, and closely aligned with  Basquait's style of mask-like features. This means hollow eyes, big mouth with teeth, sometime almost skull-like. The kids enjoyed this - some went wild with creativity and others stayed a bit truer to their own likeness.
We drew our portraits directly with very small brushes, then filled in some areas with extra black in paint using larger brushes. We then added some background colors in primary colors and white, to help emphasize our foreground. The kids were encouraged to not be too neat with this part, but to just lay down some area of color. Once dry, we used fine liners and sharpie markers to write and add drawings. We used acrylic marker pens too. The most important step was using a white gel pen to add white text, color teeth and outline our portraits. This makes our portrait stand out strongly against the wild background. 

Rune, 6

Kids 7-13 years old

Little Class (6-7 year olds)

8-11 year olds