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Colorful Landscapes

Introduce students to the mission of FAPE (Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies) and have them create a landscape in the style of Wolf Kahn, a FAPE artist.

Lesson Plan

Supplies Needed

Gather all the supplies needed to bring your craft ideas to life! From paints and markers to glue and scissors, our crafts section has everything to spark creativity and make every project truly special.

  • Paper

Steps

  • Step 1

    The Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE) is dedicated to providing permanent works of American art for U.S. embassies worldwide. Works by FAPE artists encourage cross-cultural understanding. Have students investigate the life and work of Wolf Kahn (1927-2020), a FAPE artist known for landscape painting. He worked in both realism and color field painting. Realism is a style that represents a subject truthfully, while color field painting is an abstract style characterized by large fields of color. It has been said that he combined "pictorial landscapes and painterly abstraction."

  • Step 2

    Have students view some of his paintings, such as "Glimpse of Magenta" (1993), "Dark Band" (2008), or "Sun on the Far Hills" (2017). Then ask them to use these or other Kahn paintings as inspiration as they create a landscape using oil pastels. Encourage them to make it realistic looking, as Kahn did, and also use large areas of color in the style of color field painting.

  • Step 3

    Have students present their work and talk about how they used color to create their landscape scene.

Standards

ARTS: Speculate about processes an artist uses to create a work of art. 

ARTS: Explore and invent art-making techniques and approaches. 

Adaptations

Mark Rothko is considered a pioneer in the style of color field painting. He believed color could tap into our innermost emotions. Have students look at some of his works and talk about the emotions it evokes in them.

Wolf Kahn was born in Germany was sent to Great Britain on a Kindertransport, a rescue effort that brought Jewish children out of Nazi Germany. (He eventually settled in the United States.) Have students investigate the origin of Paddington Bear, whose author, Michael Bond, was inspired by the Kindertransport.