IN THE CLASSROOM:

What do tissue paper and post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne have in common? A lot, if you were in Mrs. Blackwell’s class at Kaiser Elementary School on Monday.

It’s all part of “Art Masters,” an enrichment program that holds assemblies a few times a year to teach kids about an artist’s life, then shows them how to capture a bit of the master’s style.

Under Art Masters teacher Laura Williams’ instruction, students took squares of tissue paper and tore them into rough gray triangles for mountains, then layered finger-sized strips of blue and pink for sunset skies, green and yellow for grasses underneath, sticking the whole thing together with liquid starch. The scene was built up from its colorful components, reminiscent of the 19th-century artist the students had learned about in a recent assembly.

Some students remembered a great deal of what they were told, down to the interesting factoids.

“I remember they told us that he’s one of the only artists of that time who would paint in black and white sometimes,” student Daniel DeBassi said.

“One of the things he’s famous for is his landscapes,” Williams said. “When you go outside, you see the sky, the mountains and the grass, and the landscape we’re going to make today has all of those things.”

Williams told students to go for realism, not perfectionism.

“In nature, you don’t see clouds that are perfectly straight. You don’t see the horizon perfectly straight,” she said. “Things always have bumps and waves in them.”

The kids get excited when the assemblies come around, substitute teacher Kathie Lecours said.

“They look forward to it every single time,” Lecours said.

The fourth-graders had mountain landscapes mostly as planned, with bright skies and green grasses under suitably craggy mountains.

According to Williams, teaching art with an artist’s name attached is a lot more useful to kids than a simple art project. It teaches them not just to make art, but also to appreciate it a little better, she said.

“When they go to the assemblies, they learn what to look for,” she said. “Then they can go to a museum or out in the world and they might recognize what they see.”

MICHAEL ALEXANDER may be reached at (714) 966-4618 or at [email protected].