Paul Gauguin, (born June 7, 1848, Paris, France - died May 8, 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia), French painter, printmaker, and sculptor who sought to achieve a “primitive” expression of spiritual and emotional states in his work.
The artist, whose work has been categorized as Post-Impressionist, Synthetist, and Symbolist, is particularly well known for his creative relationship with Vincent van Gogh as well as for his self-imposed exile in Tahiti, French Polynesia. His artistic experiments influenced many avant-garde developments in the early 20th century.
Synthetism is a term associated with the style of symbolic representation adopted by Paul Gauguin in the 1880s characterised by flat areas of colour and bold outlines.
Rather than painting a naturalistic representation of observed reality, Paul Gauguin aimed to create art that combined (or synthesised) the subject-matter with the artist’s feelings about the subject and the aesthetic concerns of line, colour and form.
This colorful multimedia art project got the students in Renaissance Academy painting, printing, gluing and practicing their cutting skills. Using painting sponges they experimented with various ways of layering different shades of blue onto the paper. They pressed hard and soft until the whole paper was filled in with dubs of blue creating a smooth texture of a clear tropical sky. We selected a bright colored collage paper for the palm leaves on which they printed bold outlines with a paper roll for the leaf shapes. Next they used their cutting and gluing skills to cut out the leaves and to arrange them onto the background to form the top of the palm tree. To finalise they used cards and flat detail paint brushes to add details onto the palm leaves and to form the trunk of the palm tree. Lastly they added pom poms for the coconuts and their tropical palm tree was ready for the art show.