Les Fauves Inspired Portraits

Year 7 students from Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School explored the style of les Fauves (French for “the wild beasts”), a loose group of early twentieth-century modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. During this unit they created a wild and vibrant portrait painting showing strong emotion through subject matter and use of colour. Students took photographs of class members showing a range of emotions then choose one of these images to take through to a colourful drawing as a plan for an acrylic painting.