Thankful Tree
Kindergarten AM – Ms. Serio
Volunteeers – Bev Yamashita
Project Synopsis:
As part of an Art Appreciation Project, the class learned about the painter and artist, Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954). Throughout his career Matisse used paper models to help him compose his paintings.
During the last decade of his life, after two serious operations left him in poor health, he worked more and more with paper cutouts. – something he could do sitting up in bed or in an armchair. By 1951, he stopped painting and devoted himself exclusively to making large-scale paper cutouts and drawings.
With scissors, Matisse would cut colored papers into beautiful shapes, which he then pinned loosely to the white studio walls, later adjusting, recutting, combining, and recombining them to his satisfaction. The result created beautiful artwork that transcended the boundaries of conventional painting, drawing, and sculpture. Later, the shapes were glued to large white paper backgrounds for shipping or display. Henri Matisse produced some 270 paper cutouts in his lifetime.
During class, each child selected one or more squares of construction paper in fall leaf colors (red, orange, yellow, brown), and proceeded to trace their handprints onto the paper. On the palm of each handprint, the child wrote their name along with something they were thankful for this holiday season. Like Matisse, the children proceeded to carefully cut out the handprint shapes, and decorate a large tree (made of brown felt) that was glued to an artist’s canvas board. The finished artwork was a beautiful abstract presentation of a “Thankful Tree”, with the handprints attached like leaves to the branches.
