Joaquin Torres Garcia

This is a project that I saw over at shinebritezamorano.com which is a super awesome art teacher blog.

1st grade recently finished up their project on Joaquin Torres Garcia. He was a Constructivist from Uruguay who used the primary colors in his work. His work looks a lot like Piet Mondrian’s except that Joaquin’s also uses some symbols within his work. Joaquin’s strong use of vertical and horizontal lines was a good recap for my 1st graders.

We broke up our paper into various vertical and horizontal lines which created different sized squares and rectangles when they overlapped. Then we added other lines that we knew like angles and curves. We added a few symbols such as fish, people, houses, etc. Last but not least, we retraced everything with a black crayon.

The second (and final) day of the project we used tempera cakes to paint everything using only our primary colors.