For this project we explored painting with serious texture, the way our profiled 'Outsider', 'Brut' artist, Jean Dubuffet (France 1901-1985), did! Dubuffet disliked authority, conformism and mainstream culture. As a young man he disregarded art education, and himself dropped out of art school choosing instead to teach himself art. He was attracted to the art of children, the mentally ill and other outsiders. His art was identified as Art Brut, or Outsider Art or “raw”, “rough” art created outside the boundaries of official culture, by untrained, naïve, self-taught artist. We loved getting to know this unconventional artist!
Day 1: This project was done on stretched canvas because the textured paint is quite heavy. We began by closely observing Dubuffet's cow drawing and mapped out the placement of the cow's features onto our canvas. Our cows are purposefully wonky, wobbly and above all friendly.
We then mixed sand into a mixture of modeling paste and brown paint. Using ONLY a palette knife we then heavily smeared our thick sandy paint onto our cows, being careful to spread carefully in the legs, face and horns where the cow is thinner. The more textured the better! Our blobby cows need time to dry.
Day 2: The super textured sand-modeling paste-paint which we applied in the first class dried to a raw, bumpy and rough surface. Day two we dabbed some acrylic color spots into our cows in naturals tones using a bristle brush. We then gave them a subtle outline in black. In the background we also used modeling paste for a bit of texture and painted in two layers of paint (one dark grey the other turquoise) into which we scratched with toothpicks to reveal the layer underneath. This gave our background a textured and layered look, just like Dubuffet's. We made sure to give the eyes and utters (the kids loved this!) extra emphasis since these are focal points.
This project was done by 6-12 year olds. They LOVED this project
