Following on from our studies of famous artists in 2016, in 2017 we are studying the ‘Drawing Scissors” work of Henri Matisse. The children were shown a slide show of examples of Matisse’s collage work he called “Drawing with Scissors”. The children didn’t think that his famous “Snail” really looked like a snail at all! To start off our experimentation we used a variety of irregular foam cut pieces (thanks Sharnie!) and water to create transient pieces of art in coloured trays. We talked about regular and irregular shapes. I drew a line that almost joined and asked the children whether it was a shape. They quickly said “No”. When I asked why, they said that it wasn’t joined! How smart are 4 year olds? Matisse uses irregular shapes to make his pictures and sometimes he uses regular shapes as the backgrounds. Stay tuned for more Mattise inspired art next week.