Oak Meadow Elementary held its third annual Art Walk in its multipurpose room last Thursday evening. The fundraiser for the school’s popular “Meet the Masters” art program was also an opportunity for parents and students to browse the hundreds of pieces of student artwork on display.
Led entirely by approximately 50 parent volunteers known as art docents, the whole school concentrates on seven famous artists per year as part of their adopted “Meet the Masters” curriculum, with the February event a showcase of what’s learned. Artists that inspired this year’s projects included Van Gogh, Georgia O’Keefe, Picasso and Henri Matisse. Studying seven different renowned artists each year, for five years, students “meet” 35 masters before leaving elementary school.
The artists’ lives and works are explored in-depth, and then students apply what they’ve learned to create their own art.
“Our students don’t just do art, they are immersed in Art History,” said parent docent Sel Richard.
This year’s fifth graders got to revisit painter Frida Kahlo; they’d first learned about her back in kindergarten, the first year of a five-year cycle for them. “Kindergartners are taught basic principles like how to look at a painting,” Richard said. “We ask them things like, ‘What colors make this a happy picture?’” Their culminating project after studying Kahlo was to draw an oil and pastel picture of a bird.”
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