Curriculum Guide

New Wyoming Painters:

Matt Flint, Florence Alfano McEwin, Lynn Newman

May 11-Sept 2, 2007

Including Introduction, Images, Lesson Ideas

and Education Standards

Matt Flint

The subtle, soft, and beautiful paintings of Matt Flint hide themselves in plain sight. They are powerful, centered, yet self-effacing and true to their restrained nature.  They combine semi-abstract representations of flowers and botanicals with swatches of flat, dark and sometimes honeyed, molten color that oozes across the canvas and radiates light. His paintings feel weathered, sturdy, and resolute in their scratched and worked surfaces, but also fragile and prone to emotional resonances that swirl up if one takes the time to sit with them. The tactile, sensual nature of his work points to a love of earthy things along with the more spiritual quality that comes from harnessing and focusing a bit of consciousness on one small aspect of this physical world and letting it take you where it wants.

Florence Alfano McEwin

The powerful paintings and humorous prints in Florence Alfano McEwin’s Secrets of Red Riding Hood series focus on a literal reworking and re-imagining of the mythical imagery of Red Riding Hood and the wolf. In the bulk of the artwork, McEwin builds up and breaks down the representational/ archetypal imagery of the red clad female and animal with webbings of thick brushstrokes and runny scrims of drippy paint.  Taken as a whole meditation on the age-old communication of the male/female dynamic, emotions and traits, her paintings and prints combine aggression, intimacy, changes in power dynamics, and undertows of violence within an interaction where the players are constantly jostling for position.

Lynn Newman

The joyful and riotously colorful paintings of Lynn Newman are the most focused on traditional landscape of the three artists in this exhibition.  Newman paints the world that he knows—the horses, cows, animals and beloved terrain that he interacts with on a daily basis. It is extremely difficult in this day to make a landscape painting equally interesting, relevant and personal without resorting too much to its underlying pretty, decorative beauty, and escapist role that it plays in culture. Newman manages, very adroitly, to make his paintings personal, individual, focused on the real world, abstracted, and meditative all at the same time.

Lesson Plan One:

Animal/Plant Collage

Goal:

Creating personal versions of flora and fauna through collage-- learning to manipulate different images into a cohesive scene.

Skills/objectives:

Building arranging skills, working with scissors.

What you need:

Paint or watercolors, glue or mod podge, brushes, magazines, photos, various images, scissors, glue, large sheets of cardstock.

Procedure:

1) Begin by showing the students images of  McEwin and Newman’s prints and paintings. Explain how space, shapes, people and animals are plotted out within each image. Point out the use of collage in Newman and McEwin’s artwork, and show how it is developed and used in the context of the art.

2) Have the students decide on their favorite animals and plants.

3)  Students should then draw out a scene on scratch paper in order to get a general idea concerning what they want their scene to look like--(nothing too fancy, because ideas and concepts could change as they leaf through magazines for images).

 4) Leafing through magazines, the students should then find select images to use as parts of the scene. For example: the face of a clock could be the moon, or a picture of a streetlight could be the leg of a horse, and so on.
 
5) Cut out images and begin arranging on the big piece of cardstock.  Once their scene is visualized and plotted, begin painting.  After the paint is dry, glue or mod podge the images onto the paper and touch-up or augment any areas with paint if needed.

6) Have the students write a paragraph and explain to the class why they used specific images to represent certain things within the context of the collage artwork that they have created.

Wyoming Education Standards:

Content Standard:

Fine Arts

1. Creative expression through Production
    All Benchmarks, K-8
2. Aesthetic Perception
    All Benchmarks, K-8
3. Historical and Cultural Context
    All Benchmarks, K-8

Language Arts

3. Speaking and listening
Benchmark 1, K & Grades 1,2,3
Benchmark 2, Grades 1, 2,3
Benchmark 3, Grades 1,3
Benchmark 5, Grade 3

Vocabulary:

Flora- Plants considered as a group, especially the plants of a particular country, region, or time.

Fauna-Animals, especially the animals of a particular region or period, considered a group.

Collage- An artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface
often with unifying lines and color.

Lesson Plan Two:

Frozen in time -

create an ice-age diorama with shoeboxes and mixed media

Goal:

Create a diorama that represents a prehistoric event or object frozen in time.

Skills/objectives:

Building arranging skills, learning historical/scientific references.

What you need:

a shoebox or shadowbox, various mixed-media objects, glue, pencils, paint, etc.

Procedure:

1) Begin by showing the students images of paintings by Matt Flint, and perhaps some shadowboxes by Joseph Cornell.  Explain how the flowers and objects in Flint’s paintings appear frozen like a dragonfly in amber, and that the geometrical shapes seem to appear as encasements for the natural objects represented. Juxtapose Flint’s artwork with some images of Cornell’s shadowboxes, which display mixed-media that evokes a sense of timelessness. Show pictures of prehistoric or ice-age plants, animals, and humans--explain a little bit about the time frame and how the animals and plants interacted in their settings.

2) Have the children paint the insides of the boxes, perhaps with ice-age landscapes,  animals, and plants of the time period-- or designs of their own accord. Collage pictures or objects that correlate with their dioramas, create 3-d effects by placing objects on the “floor” of the box, or extend objects out from the back of the box by using paper shaped similar to an accordion and affixing it to the object and the box.

3) Students then share their works of art with the class and explain their tactics and experience in the process of making the artwork.

Wyoming Education Standards:

Content Standard:

Fine Arts

1. Creative expression through Production
    All Benchmarks, K-8
2. Aesthetic Perception
   All Benchmarks, K-8
3. Historical and Cultural Context
   All Benchmarks, K-8

Language Arts

3. Speaking and Listening
Benchmark 1, K & Grades 1, 2 ,3
Benchmark 2, Grades 1, 2, 3
Benchmark 3, Grades 1, 3
Benchmark 5, Grade 3

Social Studies

2. Cultural Diversity
Benchmark 1, K & Grades 1, 3, 5, 6
4. Time, Continuity and Change
Benchmark 1, Grades 5, 6
Benchmark 3, Grades 5, 6

Vocabulary

Bricolage-Something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available.

Glacial Epoch-Also called glacial period, ice age.  The geologically recent Epoch, during which much of the Northern Hemisphere was covered by great ice sheets.

Megafauna- Large or relatively large animals of a particular place or time period.  Saber-toothed tigers and mastodons belong to the extinct megafauna of the Oligocene and Pleistocene Epochs.