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galleries > artist of the month
Artist of the Month - Leonardo da Vinci
Every year in the Art Room stairwell, Mona Lisa dresses in wild
and wacky ways. She greets the children on the way to the art room.
There are all  manner
of silly Mona Lisa cards and posters on Tr. Cathy's bulletin board,
and there is now a Mona Lisa umbrella and a magnet portrait!
First grade learns about Mona Lisa and her famous painter, Leonardo
Da Vinci, during an art lesson early in the school year. They learn
about her famous smile, some things about the genuius inventor,
scientist, and painter Leonardo, and about how it took Leonardo
four years to complete the portrait!
Here is some information about Leonardo da Vinci and the Mona Lisa:
The original Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci was not just a
painter, but also an inventor, military engineer, sculptor, illustrator,
architect, and scientist. His talents were extraordinary, yet he
left many paintings unfinished, and never published his journals.
Here is a link to one of his most famous paintings, The
Mona Lisa.
Long ago, in the distant past, people had looked at portraits with
awe, because they had thought that in preserving the likeness, the
artist could somehow preserve the soul of the person he portrayed.
But artists before Leonardo made paintings where their figures look
more like statues than living beings.
 Now
the great scientist, Leonardo, had made some of the dreams and fears
of these first image-makers come true. He knew the spell that would
infuse life into the colors spread by his magic brush. To achieve
this effect, Leonardo uses the sfumato technique, a gradual dissolving
of the forms themselves, continuous interaction between light and
shade and an uncertain sense of the time of day.
Everyone who has ever tried to draw or scribble a face knows that
what we call its expression rests mainly in two features: the corners
of the mouth, and the corners of the eyes. Now it is precisely these
parts which Leonardo has left deliberately indistinct, by letting
them merge into a soft shadow. That is why we are never quite certain
in what mood Mona Lisa is really looking at us.
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