inspired by Emily Carr

One of the artist that I have the pleasure to tour often at Vancouver Art Gallery is Victoria, BC artist, Emily Carr. I love everything about her. Carr's personal story of following your heart, feminism, and perseverance are great life lessons to share with students. And as I have gotten to know the volume of her work better, there is so much more to share beyond just her paintings.

Although the paintings are spectacular.

I could not imagine not sharing Emily Carr with the campers in the "Artist a Day" camp and so this time I focused on abstraction projects inspired by her artwork.

We started out using graphite and looking at several examples of her sketches to figure out the variety of ways she abstracted trees. Then each camper explored their own unique way to abstract a tree using graphite.

6yr old

8yr old

8yr old

5yr old

8yr old

9yr old

11yr old

We then moved on to charcoal drawings. I showed them a variety of her work on charcoal and my thought was we would continue to explore abstracting a tree, however the campers had other ideas and I will always let children lead the way as to what they will spend their time drawing/painting within a project.

And so, yes, a couple of girls continued to explore abstracting a tree.

5 year old

8 year old

And thanks to the warm up and what they learned during drawing with the graphite, you can already see them implementing new skills.

6 year old

And we had lots and lots of flowers. The above artist did not like her charcoal, she stated it was a big blob. Can you imagine? Look at the layers in this! I love it but I always tell the kids it doesn't matter what anyone other than them think of their artwork and so let it stand that this was something she was not happy with in the end. Hopefully if she looks at it later on, she will change her mind and wonder why her initial response was not to like it. I know I have done that more than once with artwork I finally put aside when feeling negatively toward it.

8 year old

8 year old

9 year old

11 year old

I had shared with the campers how Emily Carr had done her charcoals while in the forest during the summer and that she would then look at these and turn them into paintings in the winter when it was cold and rainy and she couldn't get outside anymore. And then asked them to take their charcoals and turn them into acrylic paintings.

11 year old

I think all the campers enjoyed working the same image in different mediums.

9 year old

8 year old

8 year old

6 year old

8 year old

5 year old

There are some amazing works of art in this series, so many exciting interpretations of abstracting natural elements. I so enjoy looking at what each young camper took away from Emily Carr and how they used Carr for inspiration in their own unique way.

With it pouring down rain outside, this was the perfect way to spend a day enjoying the woods and nature.