BEYE Discovery: Picasso and "Pochoir"

Post & Lesson Contributed by Ally Bernstein, Assistant Teacher

For our second day exploring the work of famous 20^th century artist Pablo Picasso, we read a beautiful story titled “Just Behave, Pablo Picasso!” written by Jonah Winter and illustrated by Kevin Hawkes. This story led to a discussion of the ways in which we might break artistic rules and take risks, and the idea that there is no “correct” way to make art.

For our project, we explored a technique that Picasso was fond of – the stencil! Called “pochoir” in French, creating a stencil with one color of opaque paint naturally lends itself to the flatness that is central to cubism. Tomorrow, we would return to a more in-depth discussion of cubism, but for now we experimented with bold colors and shapes.

Jacob

We made stencils out of thick paper, and then gently painted them in with brushes. The trickiest part of this project was creating a clean edge, however the technique was extremely gratifying even when the paint crept under the stencil's edges. Some students created stencils that suggested specific figures or shapes, while other students opted for organic forms that lifted off the page. Students were also successful at pairing beautiful colors of paint with the color of their background paper.