Open-ended Art: Henri Matisse

For this week's Open-ended Art, we did a Henri Matisse inspired collage. Do visit Mommies Wise Little Bookworms for more wonderful ideas... I should have read their blogs before I attempted to do ours. I had a hard time trying to figure out how Sophie could possibly do this with minimal help. Although I have seen Matisse's works before, I still needed to look up his biography and style in various periods of his artisitic career.

In the end, I decided to let Sophie create something similiar to his works after he got diagnosed with cancer and started to use a wheelchair. I really admire his extraordinary creativity and spirit. In the last 14 years of his life, he created beautiful cut-outs which are probably more remembered than his earlier works. My elder sister died of lung cancer around 8 years ago. She was only my age and she never got her second chance to life.







I took some corrugated cardboard and cut out some typical "Matisse-like" shapes. Then I attached a "handle" on each of the shape. I did not want to simply cut out the shapes with paper and let Sophie paste onto a surface. I prefer to make her work a little more - like stamping and making the prints before I cut them out.







The corrugated cardboard made a lovely, stripey design when she stamped onto the paper. However, they were not hard enough so she could not make complete prints most of the time. Thus, we had to make many, many attempts to "collect" a few "good" ones.







We had some paint left, so Sophie did some spontaneous works with it. I hoped to use it later as well.



And from all these, we picked those shapes that were more or less complete. I took a while to cut them out, quite tricky especially when a toddler kept demanding to take a look and join in the "fun".

By now, Sophie was getting restless so I let her roam around and play with her toys a bit before coming back to do the "real" work. Meanwhile, I thought it would make the piece more "Matisse" if I contributed a little (just a little... could not resist...) to the background.

Anyway, time for Sophie to do her work. I added some tissue paper squares as well. I gathered everything and did a bit of rehearsing to have an idea of the possible end product. Of course, I secretly wished Sophie would do a good job... Sigh!

Honestly, my heart started racing the moment Sophie picked up the glue stick. I had little time to react and it was tough to take a video clip while trying to manage her work. I was so surprised that she tried to glue the edges of those tissue paper squares down. I used double-sided tape so that they would not tear and I thought she wanted to rip them off... (sorry!). Then she started gliding the glue stick on different spots and pasting all the pieces of shapes that I handed her. I had to let her do it when her energy and ethusiasm was there... And I made a last minute decision to secure the pieces only after she was done.



That was not all. She got hold of her sticker labels and started frantically taking them off to stick onto her work. She was soooo fast and she used up ALL of them... Of course, some in her hair... on the floor and wherever else...



Papa said he was impressed by Sophie's progress over an almost 9 month period. He recalled how she was when we first started doing art together. Now she was able to do a much better job and I had to agree.

End Product - "Henri Matisse" Inspired Art