DID YOU KNOW?
Coloring has the ability to relax the fear center of your brain, the amygdala. It induces the same state as meditating by reducing the thoughts of a restless mind. This generates mindfulness and quietness, which allows your mind to get some rest after a stressful or anxious time. Knowing that we can all use some mindfulness in our lives at the moment, we have created these coloring sheets from works in the USC Fisher Museum’s permanent collection.
Yamakawa Shūhō Autumn (Aki)
The artist: Yamakawa Shūhō was a Japanese painter and printmaker. Born in Kyoto in 1898, he studied with Ikegami Shūhō (from whom he took his name) and Kiyokata Kaburagi, a well-known illustrator of book covers. In the late 1920s, Yamakawa started designing woodblocks prints of beautiful women in the bijin-ga tradition (“beautiful person picture”). He passed away at 46 in 1944.
Kimono and Haori: A kimono is a traditional Japanese garment, a T-shaped, wrapped-front garment, worn left over right, and closed over with a belt called an obi. A haori is a hip- or thigh-length jacket, worn open over the kimono. These garments tell us about the wearer’s social status, age, and station in life as they were highly regulated with strict sumptuary laws until the late 19th century. The prints on the fabric are varied and beautiful.
Please take the time to read about the history and art of the kimono before coloring in your own version.
The Ancient History of Making and Wearing a Kimono
Untangling the Threads of the Kimono: Japan’s Colonial History & Cultural Reparations in Fashion
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Carlos Merida Dos Mujeres con Canasta (Two Women with a Basket)
The artist: Carlos Merida is one of Latin America’s pioneer Modernists. Merida studied painting in Paris where he met Picasso, Modigliani, and others of the Paris school. He initiated the first pro-Indian art movement in the Americas, seven years before the rise of Mexican Muralism. Although Merida assisted Diego Rivera on his first murals, his true artistic direction is more closely identified with Rufino Tamayo. Both artists shared a desire to fuse European Modernism with forms and subjects specific to the Americas. Merida’s painting has three major stylistic shifts: a figurative period from 1907 to 1926, a Surrealist phase from the late 1920s until the mid-1940s, and a geometric period from 1950 until his death in 1984.*
*Latin American Masters, Carlos Merida
Carlos Mérida: “Pintura desde las raíces indígenas para el mundo”
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Frances Gearhart The Sand Pit (at Morro Bay)
The artist: Frances Gearhart was an American printmaker and watercolorist known for her boldly drawn and colored woodcut and linocut prints of American landscapes. Focused especially on California’s coasts and mountains, she is considered one of the most important American color block print artists of the early 20th century.
Arts and Crafts: Gearhart was embedded in the time and place of the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement. The Arts and Crafts creators “sought to improve standards of decorative design, believed to have been debased by mechanization and to create environments in which beautiful and fine workmanship governed.”*
*The Arts and Crafts Movement in America
Behold the Day: The Color Block Prints of Frances Gearhart
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Edgar Ewing Dogs of Mt. Washington
The artist: Edgar Ewing was a painter who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before briefly becoming a faculty member there and a numerous other universities. Following time with the Army Corps, he worked as an artist and educator at USC. Ewing taught in the schools of Architecture and Fine Arts for 32 years before his retirement in 1978 and received the university’s Distinguished Professor Emeritus Award in 1987. The then Fisher Gallery presented an exhibitions of his works in 1993 entitled, “Edgar Ewing: The Classical Connection, Recent Work 1983-1993.”
The Confounding Art of Edgar Ewing
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The USC Fisher Museum!
The USC Fisher Museum of Art building was constructed in 1938/1939 and dedicated on November 14, 1939. The then-Fisher Gallery was named for our patron Elizabeth Holmes Fisher.
We have created a coloring sheet from a recent photograph of the museum. We have created a black space on the banner that hangs from the columns so that you can add your own message.