(upbeat music) - Hello early learners, and welcome back to the art room.

We're doing a color week this week, and we are meeting different artists each day and talking about color.

Yesterday we talked about sunflowers and Alette Straathof, and today is Helen Frankenthaler, and you'll learn a lot about her in the book, so I won't start talking about her now, but let's sing our good morning song.

And we're doing Oh, The Duck Says Quack.

So it goes like this.

♪ Oh the duck says quack and the cow says moo ♪ ♪ And the old red rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo ♪ ♪ The sheep says baa and the cat says mew ♪ ♪ And I say good morning when I see you ♪ And I told you yesterday we have to say mew instead of meow, because it says the cat says mew and I say good morning when I see you.

You, mew, they both say ooh.

Alrighty, let's start off with Helen Frankenthaler.

She's been recognized as one of the great American abstract expressionists, which means she didn't follow anybody's rules.

And when I read this story, you will find this out, but let's take a look at her art.

We're going to be looking at this one.

This is called The Bay, and the bay means part of the ocean that comes in to land.

So look, this is a bay of water.

Then there's green on here and there's some gray down below.

And here's the picture of Helen Frankenthaler.

And people say all the time she's one of the expressionists that people know, and hardly any women ever got recognized during this time period that she was alive.

It was all about the men.

But when you hear the story of her life, you will find how interesting it was.

Now this, she had started doing something.

It's known as color field painting, and she did a soak stain.

So she would pour watered-downed oil paints on her paper, and then she would lift it and some would go down and some would go sideways and some would just pool wherever she put it.

You can see it got lighter and lighter as it went down here.

And to me, I always thought this looked like a man's hairdo with his nose and a little smile, and here's his beard and his shoulders, and here's his hat that goes on top, but that's not what it is.

It's really an ocean.

But now that you saw that, I pointed that out, you'll never look at the bay again without seeing the man with a little smile.

All right.

So I hope you have some watercolors, and if not, you might do this outside too, because I'm using food color, and what I'm using is the kind that people buy to color their frosting when they are doing cakes.

But let's take a look at our book today.

The one that we're going to read is called Dancing Through Fields of Color.

I'll set my pointer stick over and get the book.

Now this book has a paper cover on it.

It's called the dust cover.

I'm going to take it off so it doesn't fly around when I'm getting ready to read it, 'cause it has a little bit different cover inside than it has on the dust cover.

Doesn't even have the title on it except on the spine.

But nothing here, no name of the book like it has on here.

So let me move this.

Oh, maybe I'll put it here, 'cause I have a lot of watercolors and I don't want anything to happen to them.

When I looked at the cover and saw this person with her arms out in nature and all these colors, I knew it was Helen Frankenthaler.

Let's see what this story tells, and look how she did some color soak inside, on the inside of the book.

Helen Frankenthaler.

Getting open, and here's the same picture that was on the cover.

Let me turn the page.

At a time when girls were taught to sit and learn, learn their manners and color inside the lines, Helen Frankenthaler colored her reds, blues and yellows any way she chose.

Helen never wanted to follow the rules.

Can you tell which one is her?

She's painting flowers and flowers and flowers and flowers and flowers, and then just color.

Our front row girl is Helen.

When her mother called her to the dinner table, Helen continued painting watercolors of the sunset shining through the apartment windows.

Instead of going to bed, Helen filled the sink with water and she dribbled in drops of ruby red nail polish and watched the colors flow.

And when she let the water out, she watched the color swirl into shapes.

Now boys and girls, don't follow what Helen's doing, because it will stain your sink.

During summer vacations, Helen let the waves whoosh and whirl around her sailing body through the tides, and when her father called her ashore, she wanted to keep circling and twisting and floating forever wrapped in the blue-green colors of the sea.

While her older sisters were in school, Helen spent her days with her mother, who nurtured her dreams, which means she just let her dreams keep coming and she'd tell her that was good.

And Helen read and wrote stories and made collages and created designs with glass beads, circles, hearts, stars, in brilliant colors, and she painted pictures and cards for birthdays and anniversaries and filled with all the colors of happiness, purple and yellow and pink.

Helen's father worked long days as a judge, and she couldn't wait for him to come home each day.

He took her wherever she wanted to go when he got home.

And most of all, Helen loved taking walks with her family in Central Park.

She ran under the welcoming sky and she would waltz and twirl and leap across the lush green fields and played hide and seek among the flowering trees, and when it was time to go, Helen took colored chalk she had stuffed in her coat pockets and she drew a line from the front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and through the park and across the street, through the crowds and around the corner, all the way home.

The colorful line connected the two things she loved most.

Helen's parents always encouraged her to blossom and express herself, paint free, and at art class at school, Helen wanted to do things her way, but she had to follow the rules in order to pass.

Don't sketch that way.

Draw like this.

Paint what you see.

So Helen pleased her teachers when she sketched figures and drew chairs and painted flowers and pears like all the other students, but she wished for something different.

Helen found comfort in painting seascapes.

The blues and greens reminded her of summer days with her family at the beach, and she made pictures of her trips to the country with bursts of orange and gold and paints that warmed her face like the sun.

Soon Helen's happiness disappeared entirely, because when she was 11, her father died and Helen missed him so much that her sadness caused pounding headaches and she struggled in school.

She tried painting, but nothing came out.

Her canvases remained blank.

Her world of colors and light were all dark, but colors lived in her mind, floating and shifting like shapes that she'd make in her childhood.

Staring at every color in her paint box, memories came back to her.

Periwinkle, the feathery whisperer of her father's encouragement.

The okra color was the warmth of her father's hand as they strolled in the country.

Cobalt and crystal, the summery splashing in the ocean's wave.

Helen began to paint again, and eventually art healed her sadness.

Helen followed the rules well enough to succeed in school and go to college and study painting.

Her professor wanted colors separated with thick black lines like an artist that was popular then, and her brush marks and planes arranged across her canvas to create depth and space.

She loved college, but she longed to paint what she felt inside.

Painting feelings couldn't be contained in black lines or organized into clear shapes or objects.

And Helen dreamed of seeing her colors free like she was a child running without boundaries, so she searched for more.

And after college, Helen moved back to New York, where many artists were exploring forms and lines and shapes differently, and they overlapped bands of color and thought more about geometry and painted larger and larger pictures.

And then Helen met the artist named Jackson Pollock, who we've studied before, boys and girls.

His paintings hung in museums and galleries, and the art world called him the greatest living painter in the United States.

Reviews celebrated him and fans loved him.

When Helen saw his work, she marveled at how he splattered and dribbled his paint on canvas and tacked it up to the studio floor.

Well she figured, if he broke the rules, why couldn't she?

So Helen exhibited hers in small shows while male or men painters were given larger places.

Critics called Helen's work too sweet in color, too lyrical, too ladylike.

She worked longer and harder at her paintings, drawing strength from her memories of the country and the sea, and she wanted to leap into her colors, feel the colors, be the colors.

Art never let her down.

She traveled to Nova Scotia to get away.

She walked through the fields of colors swirled around her.

Cerulean blue and coral cascaded down mountains of saffron and gold.

Rose, pink, lavender rippled across the sky, spring green and vermilion gushed through the sea waves.

I'm not going to read this part.

I'm just going to tell it because it's so many words, but she went and felt the countryside move in her body and she saw these mountains back home in New York.

She laid a huge canvas on the floor, and she'd put down her brush and she picked up red and yellow and she made orange, and then she made blues and yellows became greens, and she mixed and mixed and mixed and mixed rainbows, and she swirled charcoal lines across the canvas to guide her like the chalk lines she drew in the city when she was a girl, and with a fist full of pink, Helen turned her wrist outward and spread the paint.

Streams of color spiraling, and the paint was soaking into the canvas and seeping into the soil.

She grabbed a bucket of crimson and poured, setting her colors free.

They ran and rushed.

The colors turned into memories, and Helen imagined the mountain peaks of Nova Scotia with her arms.

She remembered the sea's waves with her wrists, and with a sweep of her arms, she passed green.

Colors yielded across the painting, merged and connected the rivers into oceans and the colors into feelings, and whenever the paint landed, that was the perfect place for it.

Look what she got out, a mop.

She picked up that nearby mop as her partner and she promenaded through the puddles and pools of paints, pushing and pulling her colors together.

Oranges and reds tangled, corals pirouetted, pinks plied, yellows and blues sashayed, winding and turning and spinning.

When she was done, Helen danced in that field, free among all the shimmering colors of her life, extending, reaching beyond the painting and into forever.

Wasn't that great?

She set her colors free.

So now we are going to take our paintings and use different colors.

Now I want to show you, I bought this little tablet of watercolor paper.

When I ordered it, I thought it was going to be this big.

Let me show you the size of the paper.

I thought it was going to come in a pad like this, but no, it came in a pad like this, but the weight of the paper is very thick, so I'm gonna tear out a piece and show you a small painting that I'm going to do on watercolor paper.

Now this paper is very different from the paper you probably have at home or that you buy, because that little tablet of watercolor paper was like $10.

Let me get my table.

I thought well, I can't do much with that, but I bought it specifically to take on my bike rides, because I am doing this thing.

Well, two different months I do it.

In April, it's called 30 days of biking, and you ride your bike every day and you write down how many miles you ride.

And then I met up with a man who every time he went, he painted a picture, a little watercolor picture about this big of where he had been.

The funniest one was when he was riding by a place where there were big dogs that were up on the fence, and he had them with their dog mouths open and barking and letting out the sound.

But this paper I thought would be good to do her soak stain.

Then we can do some other paintings, kind of like The Bay.

If you've ever been to the ocean, you know that the bay comes in near the land, but the big part of the ocean is way out there.

But this is just a part that comes in and is surrounded on three sides by land.

It's kind of interesting.

Now the reason I wanted to do this was I know I'm using food color that people use to color their frosting.

And I put them in my old yogurt containers.

I thought if I tried to make an ocean on my paper and I spill some of the paint on here and let it soak, and then I'll lift it up and drain it off into this container.

This had some food in it and it's just the perfect one to pick up and hold the paper.

So I'm gonna start out with this darker blue.

Let me move this paper, because I want to paint with it after this, but I want us to test pouring it, and I didn't want to pour pour it because, oh, let me show you what I got it.

This is what the food color comes in.

It's not the drippy kind that you get for your food.

It's little gel, and it looks kind of like colored gel, like Flubber, or what else did we used to make that would make kind of clear Play-Doh?

But let's take a look.

Instead of pouring, I decided I was gonna get a spoon and I was gonna use a spoon and get into the color and put it on here.

Now I'm just gonna let it soak in a minute.

Can you see how big of a dot I have on there?

Not very much.

It's just staying in place.

And then I can do this, and then I'm going to let it rush off the edge of the paper, and you can see what it makes.

I'll make a little bit more on this side and let it rush off and maybe turn it this way and let you see what happens.

Now the color is in the bowl.

I'll try and get this one out and set it on my newspaper, put it away and get the other blue.

I got two different blues 'cause I thought well, there are some dark blues and there are light blues and turquoise blues.

And even though one is called a dark blue, it looks like they're turning into the same color.

Oh no, one is more turquoise.

I'm gonna set that down.

I'll bring the green one over.

I'm gonna let it sit there for a little bit.

You can see how I dig out the food color.

I use a paper clip.

Look, you can see the gel hanging off of it, and I'm gonna stir it in there to make the green even darker.

I just use a paper clip, 'cause you can't really keep anything because this stains everything.

Let's get a new drip, put it here like land.

I'm gonna let it soak in a little bit, 'cause it's making, where I let it soak in, you can see it's making little circles of color.

I'm gonna hold this, and maybe it'll go and blend in with the one that's next to it.

Oh, it did.

Oh, that's kind of pretty.

I think what I'll do is put two colors together, and let's see what they do when they blend together.

I'll put the green up here, set it there, and then put some blue next to it and see what happens when they mix.

Oh, they make yet another color of blue, and you can turn your paper and let it go off.

Remember when she talked about making greeting cards?

I might make this into a greeting card for someone and say happy birthday or I miss you or something like that.

I did strip a little yellow too, but I'm gonna put one more green here and let it just drip down maybe this way.

Have you got yours going and doing this?

I wonder what it will do if I use the thinner paper?

But this one looks like an ink blot, kind of.

I think I'll put a little yellow on here.

Maybe it can be like sand.

It's not very dark.

I don't know if I got enough food color in there.

We'll see.

Get some of the green off.

Oh, here's my paper towel.

I think I'll wipe the spoon off so it doesn't have any color on it at all, not even a little bit.

Oh, there was a little green on there.

So I'll put this on here, get some yellow and let it soak in, soak and run it.

Go, go, go.

Oh, it mixed in with that blue and made it green.

I think I'm gonna pour some of this, 'cause I didn't make very much of it.

Pour it here and let it go down.

This is what she did.

Can you imagine getting a mop and standing on a big, giant painting and sending the colors every which way?

All right, I'm gonna let this dry on my paper towel.

Don't get it on the chair, Mrs. Readwright.

I'll put this up here and get this.

While I'm getting my paper, I want to tell you about tomorrow.

Tomorrow, if you've ever been to Disneyland and gone on the Small World ride, the woman who designed the Small World, I am going to tell you about her, and we're going to make kind of a puzzle of buildings that might be colorful like the Small World.

Okay, here's my painting of this, and I'm putting colors and I could put this on here and let it drip down.

It goes through the yellow and makes like a lime color.

Oh, that looks pretty.

You can just keep mixing colors and see what happens when you load up your brush and put the colors on there and see them swirl down the paper.

Go, paper.

I don't have my dish under here, but I do have my paper-covered workspace.

I could make some other things on here and color, make some shapes and do things around the outside of it.

Wash it off in my watercolor brush.

The pouring and the soaking is really a Helen Frankenthaler thing.

I think I'll bring this darker blue over, too.

I think about Kandinsky and how he does those concentric circles.

That would look pretty.

You don't have to just do what Helen Frankenthaler did, 'cause remember what she said?

She broke the rules.

I think that if you want to do your painting and you decide what colors you're going to do and which way you're going to make your drawing or painting, that's the great thing.

All I ask you to ask your parents about, they don't need to help you do your art, but they can help you and tell you where you can do the art so you don't make a mess in certain parts of your house.

But everything else, your parents shouldn't put their hands on top of your hands to make your painting.

If they want to do a painting, I always say get your parents a piece of paper too, 'cause we like for people to do their own work, 'cause that's the fun of it.

When somebody else does your work for you, you think wait, wasn't mine good enough?

I always worry that when people try and do someone else's work for them.

Oh, I liked that lime green.

I'm gonna mix that with that.

Oh, that's really pretty.

It's kind of like a spring green.

If I pick it up, I think it's all gonna blend together.

Oh, that one did when I touched there.

Maybe if I put dots on here and let it go down.

Oh, it's making really pretty marks.

Are you using watercolors or food colors?

'Cause some people don't have food coloring.

You can buy it at the place where everything's a dollar.

They're just not this dark of colors because they make their colors a little lighter so that your food doesn't turn into such bright colors.

But I like to use it and make it so colorful.

I use this when we're doing sky things when you paint over crayon, 'cause this is not very thick.

All right, so tomorrow when you come to do Mary Blair, you are going to need to bring cardboard.

Now I just used an old box and cut mine, and I will show you the one I started just as an example.

My piece of cardboard is about this big, and then I cut it in half, 'cause we're going to make a puzzle.

I went to an art class where a young high school girl was showing how to use recycled materials, because you know Earth Day was back in April, April 22nd.

She was showing how to use recycled materials to make art or to make art-like things, and so she made a puzzle out of cardboard, and she used construction paper and glue.

So you'll need cardboard, scissors, construction paper, glue or glue sticks if you want to make this project.

Or if you don't have any cardboard, you can just cut it out of paper and make sort of a puzzle yourself.

But I'm going to be making a puzzle of buildings that are kind of like Small World, and you'll learn about the lady who designed it, because at the time a lot of the things at Disneyland were darker colors, and she brought in bright colors.

So we'll read a book about her, her name is Mary Blair, and make a puzzle.

I think you're going to like it because I got super excited about it.

♪ Oh it's time to say goodbye to all my friends ♪ ♪ Oh it's time to say goodbye to all my friends ♪ ♪ Oh it's time to say goodbye ♪ ♪ Give a smile and wink your eye ♪ ♪ Oh it's time to say goodbye to all my friends ♪ One other thing.

I have clips that I'm putting on my cardboard so that as the glue dries it will hold it together, 'cause you need it for the puzzle.

See you tomorrow, boys and girls.

Bye bye.

(upbeat music)