Morris Louis

Morris Louis was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1912. His name was Morris Louis Bernstein but he dropped the Bernstein in the late 1930s. He studied art at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts but he left school before finishing the program.

He went to New York in 1936. Louis helped with some workshops that helped artists use unusual tools, like spray guns, to create art. These workshops helped grow the Abstract Expressionist movement.

Louis didn’t stay in New York for long. In 1940 he moved back to Baltimore and began showing his work. A group of local artists liked his work and convinced him to teach them.

Louis moved to Washington, D.C. in 1952 and started teaching at the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts. He didn’t have many friends in the art world and didn’t travel much to learn about new styles of painting. While in D.C., Louis met artist Kenneth Noland. Noland took Louis to New York where he saw the work of many new artists. One artist, Helen Frankenthaler, really inspired Louis. This painting, Mountains and Sea, especially moved him. Frankenthaler had stained the canvas rather than just painting it. Louis would try this method when he returned to D.C.

Louis began a series of paintings that he called Veils. To create his Veils, Louis poured paint onto a canvas and then poured thin black paint over the colors. Check out this Veil painting.

When he had finished his Veil paintings, Louis didn’t know what to paint next. He wasn’t happy with anything he created and he destroyed about 300 paintings.

Finally, in 1960, Louis began painting another series, called Unfurleds. In these paintings, Louis painted stripes of bright color that began in the upper corners and met at the bottom center in a V-shape. This is a great example on an Unfurled painting.

Morris Louis created one more famous series of paintings, called Stripes. The Stripes paintings featured slightly overlapping stripes of bright colors that began part way down the canvas and ran off the bottom. Louis’ Stripe paintings are my favorites. Check out this one and this one.

Louis died in 1962.

Tomorrow: A Morris Louis project.

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Final NaNoWriMo Update 2008

Now that NaNoWriMo has ended, I want to tell you how I fared in this year's National Novel Writing Month. As you know, I reached 50,000 words on November 25th. Today, I finished the month at 60,040 words! And THE END were the final two! This year was very successful, mainly because there was a great group of other writers in my area who were also working on NaNovels. We helped each other a lot this month with support and encouragement.

In case you're interested, below is a graph that shows my progress throughout NaNoWriMo 2008 in comparision to last year. Can't wait to add a third line next year!

And now, on to December. May it be filled with art projects.

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Math Curse by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith

What is this? A bonus post? Hmmm.

Happy Saturday. Saturdays are reserved for those rare times when I want to say something that has nothing to do with art.

I want to recommend a great book by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith called Math Curse. A boy’s teacher, Mrs. Fibonacci, suggests that “you can think of almost everything as a math problem.” When the boy wakes up the next morning, math is all around him. It’s in his morning routine, it’s at lunch, it’s in social studies, English, and P.E. classes. The boy just can’t escape the math curse!

There are references to math concepts that students won’t learn until middle school or high school but they’re subtle. For instance, though the math teacher’s name is Mrs. Fibonacci, it doesn’t matter that a third grader wouldn’t know what the Fibonacci Sequence is. I think this would be a great book to read to upper-elementary-level math students on the first day of class.

There is another book in this series, Science Verse, that I do not recommend for young students. Unlike Math Curse, when reading Science Verse it is important to understand the upper-level science concepts to find enjoyment in the book. If you read Science Verse to elementary school students, you would have to spend a lot of time explaining ideas.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

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My Current NaNoWriMo Word Count:

56140 / 60000 words. 94% done!
One more day to go!

Loara Standish

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you Americans! I’ve neglected the art lately, I know. Everything will go back to normal on Monday, when we move from November into the wonderful, much less stressful, December.

In celebration of Thanksgiving, I thought I’d share with you Loara Standish’s sampler. A sampler is a piece of embroidery that women used to make to show how skilled they were with a needle. I, for one, am glad we don’t have to do that anymore! It looks difficult!

Loara Standish was the daughter of Myles Standish. Myles Standish arrived in the New World on the Mayflower and signed the Mayflower compact. He then became the Military Captain of the colony at Plymouth.

To stitch her sampler, Loara Standish sat in her doorway where there was plenty of natural light. Remember, the colonists didn’t have electricity. Imagine having to stop working when dusk settled!

I think she did a lovely job.

Enjoy your holiday [or your Thursday : ) ]!

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My Current NaNoWriMo Word Count:

51167 / 60000 words. 85% done!

I adjusted my goal from 50,000 to 60,000!

NaNoWriMo Winner!

And from the sludge that is her novel, she emerges, just north of the 50,000-word finish line.

She looks around, confused. "What day is it?" she asks.

"Why, it is Tuesday, November 25th."

"November 25th? It isn't time yet. No, no," she mumbles, disappearing back into the sludge. "It isn't time yet."

Yes! I have reached 50,000 words! And look at the pretty winner's badge!