GRANT WOOD

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F I R S T G R A D E

A RT AWA R E N E SS

SPOKESMAN FOR REGIONALIST PAINTING MOVEMENT• During the Great Depression few artist could afford to travel to Europe to

study art so the regionalist movement began. The regionalist movement meant art may be in an style and defined by painting what an artist lives with, in or around.

• He was Iowa’s most famous painter

• His painting American Gothic is one of the most famous American paintings

• He said “got all his best ideas for painting while milking a cow”

• He used growing up on a farm and his memories as inspiration

• Modern life like telephone poles or tractors rarely appear in his landscapes

AMERICAN GOTHIC

• Grant Wood’s American Gothic is a bit ersatz — the artist recruited a Cedar Rapids dentist, B.H. McKeeby, to pose as the farmer, and his sister Nan plays the woman (conceived as the farmer’s spinster daughter, not his wife).

• But the setting was inspired by a real cottage in Wood’s native Iowa, and by his admiration for “the kind of people I fancied should live in that house.”

• “I tried to characterize them honestly, to make them more like themselves than they are in actual life,” he said. “To me they are basically good and solid people.”

Art Institute is the home of American Gothic painted in 1930

OTHER GRANT WORK• Texture – a perceived surface quality of a work of art. Helps the view

imagine how it would look or feel.

• Pattern-a repeated decorative design

• Landscape – All the visible features of an area of countryside or land

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WEST BRANCH IOWA THE BIRTHPLACE OF HERBERT HOOVER

OUR GRANT INSPIRED LANDSCAPES

• Divide your paper into three horizontal lines- not straight and not all similar. The top one will be your horizon. Then add a few more lines to divide these.

• Add different patterns to each segment but leave one completely blank. This will be your crops in the rolling hills. I use sloppy x’s to make my rows of corn. Dots, lines, and grids are all great patterns.

• Add clouds, trees and bushes if desired repeating their shapes.

• Outline the patterns and the lines with darker lines, either using markers or pressing harder with your crayon

• Now add color using the crayons one item at a time. We started at the top. For the clouds I outlined them in blue and then colored the sky blue. You must leave the clouds white.