It is so wonderful to be back in school and teaching a new crop of students after a long, long break. I really hope we can carry on, the kids were so enthusiastic and full of joy to be painting and talking about art again. This year's cohort are younger than last years but they rose to the challenge beautifully.
We had a great chat to start the session, I read them a part of John McCrae's poem In Flanders Field and they agreed that the poem was both beautiful and sombre. They loved the imagery of the poppy fields and the larks and wanted to put their poppy paintings on a black background to show how serious a subject it is.
We also had a chat about abstraction, looking at Van Gogh and the poppy-like Surrounded Islands of Biscayne Bay by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The children understood that sometimes you can use one shape or texture to suggest another, and that sometimes you don't need to draw what you see to get the feeling of the subject.
The project itself was messy and fun, we cut out four circles of different sizes (I cut them out in advance for the 4 year old class) and then painted them in deepening shades of red, adding more black paint as each circle got smaller so that the smallest was almost black. We then used found objects such as straws, bowls, pasta, fingers and forks to make prints on the circles in red, black and white.
As we waited for the paint to dry we sat together and read Footpath Flowers by Jon Arno Lawson and Sydney Smith. This is a graphic novel which looks at beauty and how it can be found in unusual places. A little girl finds flowers and gives them to strangers, adding colour to the drab streets of her walk home.
To finish up we glued the stack of circles to their black backgrounds and then added a liberal sprinkling of flax seeds to the centre of each to add texture, many of the little ones loved this part the most, cupping and playing with the seeds before sprinkling them over their artworks.
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