Use Our Lesson Plans
Artist Alex Katz has created important art works in the style of modern realism. His paintings and prints explore light, landscape, time, fashion, and human relationships. Katz’s trademark techniques include: pouncing (perforating a drawing and dusting it with chalk to transfer an image to canvas); using billboard-scale canvasses, and painting in strong flat colors. These techniques showcase composition, scale, light (natural and artificial) and the ephemeral nature of moments in time. His works appear deceptively minimal, and yet they contain a blunt and aggressive beauty.
Go to this lesson plan.
Folk Art is a term used to describe works created by people with little or no formal training as artists. In other words, folk art is the work of ordinary people. In the 1800s, items like weathervanes, pottery, or blankets served utilitarian purposes. Sometimes folk art was created solely for decorative purposes. Regularly, however, these works were created to celebrate and commemorate ordinary peoples’ lives.
Go to this lesson plan.
Joan Whitney Payson (1903-1975) had many interests, which she followed with great enthusiasm. She was a sports fan, a supporter of health care and medical science, and a patron of the arts. Her passion for art led her to create a wonderful personal collection which adorned her homes in New York, Florida, and Maine. Mrs. Payson's taste was discerning and varied. Although she favored Impressionist paintings, she also collected a range of works from 18-century portraits to mid-20th-century landscapes. She surrounded herself and her family with art that appealed to her personally—art that she enjoyed living with.
Go to this lesson plan.
A portrait can tell you a lot about a person. Embedded in each portrait are clues about the subject’s background: their class, their hobbies, their personality, and whatever else the artist chooses to portray or the sitter requests be transmitted. For this reason, portraits are among the most personal works of art, carefully constructed representations of a chosen subject, advertisements of who they are. One can act as a detective in looking at a portrait, searching to see what can be uncovered about a person’s life and personality.
Go to this lesson plan.
