Artist of the Week

Hudson K-8's artist of the week is 7th grader, Steven Hawkins. Steven freehanded an excellent likeness of an expressive portrait found in lesson 2 of the Glencoe's class set textbook series Understanding Art.  In lesson 2, Steven learned how to create a portrait drawing in which the subject matter is using distortion and exaggeration to show a particular mood or feeling.

The color scheme used in Hawkins' artwork is used to emphasize the mood or feeling of the character. The theme used in creating the portrait is also the theme of the lesson, which is creating an expressive portrait.

The lesson was fashioned to experience the style and expression of artist William H. Johnson (pictured above) an African American painter born in Florence, South Carolina, and is becoming more widely recognized as one of the greatest American artists of the 20th Century. Johnson became a student at the Nation Academy of Design in New York. As his style evolved from realism to expressionism to a powerful folk style (for which he is best known), his work always evokes transitory and sublime sensations, that have been often mimicked but never matched. Without question, he has widened the perimeter of how the Negro historical experience will be remembered and how it will be defined in the future.

Before his death he donated all of his work to the National Museum of American Art, now the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2006, the Smithsonian American Art Museum organized and circulated a major exhibition of his works, William H. Johnson’s World on Paper. The exhibition traveled to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in 2007.

 

His use of the African American community of both Harlem and South Carolina as well as a very conscience "folk" style of painting helps to show how the concept of "self" was linked to the tradition and change in Harlem. By casting an urban scene within a rural style of painting Johnson speaks to the sense of the new, urban, African American community is formed from the displaced parts of past communities.

Resources:

William H. Johnson: Smithsonian American Art Museum

YouTube: Freehand Drawing

Portrait Art Lessons