3/3 Art 3rd grade

Hello Artists, 

This week we will learn about local Northwest self taught artist, American painter and printmaker, James Lavadour. A member of the Walla Walla tribe, he is known for creating large panel sets of landscape paintings. Read the short biography below to learn more about James Lavadour.

 Born in 1951 in Pendleton, Oregon, James Lavadour grew up in a family “where everyone made or did something that could be called art.”1 Lavadour's father, Joseph came from a family with many branches – French Canadian, Chinook, Walla Walla, and Assiniboine Sioux – and his mother, Colleen, is of German-Irish descent. Lavadour began seriously painting by the time he was twenty, and among his first works were abstract landscapes using food coloring and watercolor. Much has been made of the fact that Lavadour is a self-taught painter, yet he was not isolated in a self-contained world. The land itself was Lavadour's teacher. Regular hikes through the hills on the Umatilla Indian Reservation provided rigorous training in the powers of observation and the processes of geologic time.

In the 1970s Lavadour moved back to the reservation from Walla Walla, Washington, where he had finished high school and began to work for tribal government in education, social services and land-use management. During these years, he pursued his art and key figures in Pendleton and in the tribal community helped him connect with the broader art world. By the 1980s, he was showing widely, with work chosen for exhibitions at the University of Oregon’s Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, Sacred Circle Gallery in Seattle, the Seattle Art Museum and the Heard Museum in Phoenix. Realizing that this success was made possible only through the support of others, Lavadour sought a way to assist other emerging artists on the Umatilla reservation and beyond. The concept for Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts was born. Founded by Lavadour and several collaborators in 1992, the institute’s mission is to provide educational, social, and economic opportunities for Native Americans through artistic development. It offers workshops and classes in traditional and contemporary arts, and emphasizes the role art can play in communities as an economic and cultural resource. 

(excerpted from the exhibition essay, James Lavadour: The Properties of Paint, by Rebecca Dobkins)

Supplies:

-sketchbook 

-pencil

-colored pencils

Instructions:

Watch the video above to go on a virtual tour of James Lavadour's The Properties of Paint exhibit at Willamette University's Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem Oregon. Use one of Lavadour's paintings below for inspiration and sketch and color your own landscape in your sketchbook. Feel free to work outside and like Lavadour; use nature as inspiration. 

Keep your sketches for reference when we start our Lavadour inspired landscape next week.

I can't wait to see what you create!

💜

Melissa