It’s been a long time since I posted any art history projects and I wanted to start it back up. I bought the book Vincent’s Starry Night and Other Stories by Michael Bird, Illustrated by Kate Evans. It’s such a beautiful book! I’m planning to do art projects with my kids to coordinate with chapters in the book and post some here. We started with Emily Kame Kngwarreye.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910-1996)
Emily didn’t start painting seriously until she was almost 80, but she became one of the most successful artists in the history of contemporary Indigenous Australian art! She lived in Australia in an area called Utopia. Many of her paintings are made up of lines and dots of different colors and patterns. She used her fingers to make the lines of dot across the canvas.
Page from Vincent’s Starry Night and Other Stories by Michael Bird.
For our own art project, we used paper and acrylic paint. First we painted lines with a brush all over the paper in different colors, trying to fill in all of the white space. Then, we used our fingers to make dots of different colors following the lines. Emily’s paintings were inspired by the desert landscape around her. My daughter titled her painting “The Mice Map with Mice Words”.
Painting lines with a brush.
Painting dots with a finger.
Lots of color and patterns.
“The Mice Map and Mice Words”