This workshop initiates kids to the highly poetic art of Joan Miró. They are invited to experiment with their imagination, poetry and spontaneity in his style.
Children will use the pictural grammar of Miró to paint their very own beautiful works of art.
A few words on Joan Miró
Born in 1893 in Barcelona, Joan Miró was a famous, Spanish Catalan artist. His art covers sculpture, painting, as well as ceramics. He died in 1983 in Palma.
His father was a watchmaker, and his mother worked as a goldsmith. So, from a very young age Miró was exposed to the arts and worked with various forms of art. Some of his work can be dated back to 1901 when he was only 8 years old.
Initially, Miró went to business school as well as art school and he worked as a clerk when he was a teenager. In 1911, Miró suffered from typhoid illness. He then also decided to devote his life to painting and art.
As many artists of his generation, he was influenced and experimented with Fauvism and Cubists. Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cezanne were amongst the artist that greatly inspired him.
However, “The Tilled Field”marked the turning point in Miro’s art toward a personal style. Indeed, a large ear and eye appear in the painting, symbolizing the painting.
The following is an excerpt of an article published in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/aug/24/art-miro-painting-surrealism-germany):
When he started as an artist in about 1916, several visual languages were predominant: photography and advertising, and the traditional artistic representation, including post- Impressionism. But by 1922-23 Miró had no further use for them. They prevented him from seeing and feeling. They blocked his view, much as platitudes are an obstacle to speech.
In just a short time, without realising that André Breton was simultaneously doing the same thing in poetry, he cast off all the usual, worn-out graphic and pictorial turns of phrase, and began to invent other shapes and arrange them together. For example, it seemed to him that at a certain level of awareness a triangle and a few circles could be sufficient to represent the female body. But the triangle might open too and metamorphose into an oval divided in two by a centre line, making it look like the leaf of a tree.
Similarly he had the impression that when human beings look at one another or touch, we perceive qualities such as the elasticity of flesh or the texture of skin. We only think of the skeleton or skull when forced to do so. Miró consequently stretched the anatomy of his figures, made them sinuous and flowing, with no concern for ordinary proportions. He proceeded in much the same way with animals, deciding it was more important to highlight essential functions – a bird’s flight, the sexual potency of a bull – than morphological characteristics.
Because he developed a new language of his own he achieved amazing intimacy with both beings and objects. He thus had no need for fantasy or symbols. He painted very simple things, but because he painted them with a hitherto unknown simplicity he endowed them with an almost physical presence. With Miró every work is a first-time event – and he carried on in this vein for 50 years.”
Practical information
Date: Saturday 1st April 2017
Time: 14:00 to 16:30
Ages: This workshop is recommended for children from 6 to 13 years old.
Location: Atelier du Square, rue François Bonivard 4, 1201 Geneva. Click here to see map.
Fee*: CHF 55.- per child, materials and snack included, for the 2h30 workshop.
Enrolment : Please download the enrolment sheet here. Complete it and scan or take a picture of it and return to [email protected]. Payments are due on signature of the enrollment sheet. E-banking details are at the bottom of the enrollment sheet. Thank you.
Information : Eurydice Labaki, [email protected], +41 (0) 78 696 12 45
