he speaks for the trees.

His name is Pearl.

Pearl Fryar.

He has been creating a topiary garden on the grounds of his house in South Carolina for the past 30 years. He has over 300 plants on his property that he continues to shape from morning until night on most days of the week. Some of the pieces are hard edged geometric abstractions while others are looser, more natural looking spirals and curves.

There is a documentary of him and his work called "A Man Named Pearl". You can stream the video on Netflix. He is a pretty extraordinary artist and man. So passionate. So giving. The documentary is a great watch and provides insight into his process, philosophy, and history.

I shared a number of images from his website with my second grade classes this week. We talked about how he makes his work, and the fact that he has to maintain and cultivate it for many years. Trees and bushes do not stop growing. When our Gee's Bend quilts were done, they were done. If we worked on a tree, that would not be the case.

Since we could not create a real topiary in class (although it would be cool to start a couple on campus this year), we created drawings of our own gardens. Before we did this, we looked at a couple photos of Pearl's garden more closely, so we could talk about how 3d space was implied in them.

The students found out that shapes that are closer appear to be lower and shapes that are far away start higher up in the image. They also discovered that shapes appear largest when they are closer to you, and smaller when they move away from you.

They also saw that shapes looked 3d in the photos because of the play between light and shadow.

When hands on portion started, I emphasized that what their plants looked like was up to them. I modeled sizing and positioning, but they were not supposed to copy what my plants looked like.

Once the composition was laid in the next step was to use light and dark to create the illusion of volume in the plant shapes.

The kids really enjoyed seeing what Pearl could do with a living thing. They also really got a kick out of seeing somebody make art with hedge trimmers!

Thanks for the inspiration, Pearl! 

george and nancy.

This project was inspired by a print that my in-laws have at their house in Maine. The image is framed right outside the room we stay in when we visit them. I love the bold coloring and the abstraction of the natural and man made forms in the composition.

The image was painted by artist George Anderson. He grew up in Canada and started a very successful design firm that he later sold to devote his creative energy to fine art and painting images of the sea and the people who make a living from it.

I thought it would be nice to keep with the sea them that we investigated with our whale drawings the week before. This time, students made a drawing that depicted the human elements of the sea instead of the natural elements that are found underwater.

When we looked at paintings from his website I prompted the students to identify the different ways George creates 3d space even though his shapes are relatively flat. They discovered that big shapes look close and small ones look far, shapes that start out low look close and shapes that start out high look far, and that overlapping shapes makes one look like it is behind another.

We also discussed warm and cool colors because George often has a very vibrant color palette in his paintings.

Students drew along with me as we created a contour line drawing with our pencils. The coloring was done with Crayola twistable slick sticks. They are a very soft oil pastel that blends very nicely after you put it down, but then dries nicely afterwards. 

I demonstrated how to press very softly with the colors and then blend them into the paper with a finger. The kids thought this was very cool. They really liked the intensity of the colors. We also worked with making colors lighter by adding white or a yellow on top and mixing it in. We did this so that our shapes would look more 3d. Students also added shadows to the water since the sun was behind the objects in their drawings. I like the way these drawings came out, however, I am bummed because the slix sticks go so fast. Ten 2nd grade classes using them is about all I am going to get out of them:(

I decided to work from a number of images that George painted, so that we would have a bit more variety in our art exhibits throughout the school year. 

Thanks goes out to Nancy for turning me on to George's work and thanks goes out to George himself for making so many great abstractions of the Maine sealife.