Art

Each classroom has one 50-minute art class per week with the art specialist.  Art offers a wide variety of opportunities for artistic expression.  In addition to heightening individual student’s specific artistic skills, the program helps develop aesthetic awareness, self discipline and personal fulfillment.  Classrooms teachers also incorporate art into many of their learning activities.

ART DEPARTMENT
David Rivers, Art teacher
720-561-6942

Welcome! As the art teacher at Heatherwood, I am looking forward to getting to know each and every student through many creative adventures. We will be discovering many things about the elements of art (color, line, shape, texture, and space) and the principles of design as we draw, paint, sculpt, build, observe, and talk about art. We will be using many different art materials and techniques to communicate our ideas and feelings. We will be learning about artists and art from different cultures. We will have fun learning and making Art!

Our curriculum sequentially supports the district and state Visual Arts Standards as follows:

• Communication: Students recognize and use the visual arts as a form of communication.
• Perception: Students know and apply the elements of art, principles of design and sensory and expressive features of the visual arts.
• Materials and Techniques: Students know and apply visual arts materials, tools, techniques, processes and technology.
• History and Culture: Students relate the visual arts to various historical and cultural traditions.
• Analysis: Students analyze and evaluate the characteristics, merits and meanings of works of art.

What can you do as a parent?

• Ask your child about art class.
• Display your child's art projects with pride.
• Keep a portfolio with all your child's artwork.
• Frame and display your child's work in your home.
• Volunteer to be an art room helper.
• Donate interesting unwanted junk to the art department.
• Take your child to art galleries, art shows and museums.
• If you are an artist or have an art speciality, volunteer to share your talent at Heatherwood.

Diego Rivera’s “El Venedor de Alcatraces” uses strong colors and stylized, densely composed forms to portray a native Mexican peasant, representative of the burden borne by that country’s working class. Rivera (1886 – 1957) supported revolutionary politics, and strove to convey his ideal of a socialist utopia to Mexicans through frescoes which depicted Mexico’s history and social challenges. Creating art that would be easily accessible to working class people, Rivera revived outdoor mural painting, depicting historical scenes as tributes to folk traditions, making him one of Mexico’s most adored and influential artists.

"The Gulf Stream" was based upon studies made during Homer's two winter trips to the Bahamas in 1884–85 and 1898–99. First exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1900, the picture was subsequently reworked and "improved" by the artist. Early photographs show changes to the sea and to the back of the ship, making the composition more dramatic and vivid. The painting was shown in this state at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1900–01, and then at M. Knoedler and Co. in New York, where the artist placed on the picture the record-asking price of $4,000. There were problems selling the work because of either its high price or its unpleasant subject matter. Homer may have reworked the painting again in the face of this criticism in order to add the rigger on the horizon that signals hope and rescue from the perils of the sea.