Family Saturday at Home: Exploring Color and Texture

About Nicolas Party

Nicolas Party is a figurative painter who has achieved critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that simultaneously celebrate and challenge conventions of representational painting. Transforming these objects into abstracted, biomorphic shapes, Party suggests deeper connections and meanings. His unique visual language has coalesced in a universe of fantastical characters and motifs where perspective is heightened and skewed to uncanny effect. You can find out more about Nicolas Party here.

You Will Need Anything that you can find at home and are allowed to use! Party’s works are primarily created in soft pastel, an idiosyncratic choice of medium in the 21st-century, and one that allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in his depictions of objects both natural and manmade. In addition to paintings, Party creates public murals, pietra dura, ceramics, installation works, and sculptures, including painted busts and body parts that allude to the famous fragments of ancient Greece and Rome.

Activity 1: Zoom-in Nature Walk

If you have access to outdoor space, take a walk in your neighborhood or home garden. On your walk, collect fallen leaves, blades of grass, weeds, or flowers on the ground. Look deeply at the found natural objects and see if you can find different patterns, colors, and textures after close inspection. Use your observations as inspiration for an artwork on paper. Use pastels, crayons, markers, colored pencils, watercolor paints, or whatever colorful medium you have at home, to blend new colors together and create distinct patterns, replicating the details of your found nature objects.

Activity 2: Paper Portraits and Landscapes

Search your home for different types of paper… construction paper, magazine cutouts, old wrapping paper, newspaper. Cut out shapes from different types of paper. Layer paper shapes on top of one another to create faces, self portraits, landscapes, and more. Try not to use pens, pencils, or other drawing tools. Rely on the different shapes and textures of the paper to create detail and depth.

Activity 3: Create a Still Life

Set up a still life made up of objects found around your home. Books, fruit, bowls, and even your pet, can serve as wonderful subjects! Using whatever medium you’d like (paint, colored pencils, crayons, watercolor), construct your still life, making creative color choices. Try using unusual colors for different objects and see how your still life transforms!

We would love to see what you create!

Can you photograph your artwork or ask someone to help you? Here are two easy ways to share your artwork with us: • Tag us on social media using @hauserwirthsomerset (Instagram) or @HWSomerset (Facebook) and use the hashtags #FamilySaturday #HWLearn • Or fill out this form and attach some photos

For further activities we recommend: Garden School Foundation: At-Home Learning Guide Royal Academy: Make a Recycled Sculpture – Family Saturdays have been a popular monthly event at Hauser & Wirth Somerset and Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. As we embark on our new shared reality, our education team will continue to create activities connected to our exhibitions and artists – encouraging practical hands-on tasks and imaginative narratives to enjoy together as a family.