Robert Spear Dunning was an artist from Brunswick, Maine and best known for lush still life, portrait and landscape painting. His highly realistic or “trompe l’oeil” painting with luscious looking fruit on a highly polished table. His early work was dark in color and tones, and later ones were luminous. Inspired by Dunning’s stunning fruits sill life painting, our Junior Kindergarten One Mozart students studied the definition of still life painting and interpreted it in a slightly different way in this art project, which was instead of painting the objects we decided to form the shape of the object with torn paper collage.

We picked oranges as our still life painting object. First, everyone painted a large piece of background paper with a brush. Then, they painted a small piece of paper with red, orange and a bit of yellow acrylic paints with a sponge brush. Instead of brush the paint thoroughly to the paper students dabbed the paints onto the paper using the corner and flat surface of a sponge brush, which added texture and movement to the piece. Students practiced paper tearing that gave them the idea of deformation and form. By the end, each student filled in the shapes for their orange still life by using torn paper technique.