Today, as part of St. Vincent’s Art Week, Year 6 were lucky enough to visit the October Gallery to take part in an Art workshop.
Initially, we had the chance to investigate and discuss the work of Golnaz Fathi, who is the featured artist whose work is on display at the moment. She is an abstract artist who lives and works in Iran and she uses acrylic paints and spray paints to create her large, vibrant artworks. We were able to share our knowledge about abstract art from our Art unit about Paul Nash. We also learned that Golnaz Fathi was trained in Arabic calligraphy and uses Arabic style writing as part of some of her creations. We were very excited to learn this as it links to our learning about Islam in Religious Education.
Next, we learned about the work of another abstract artist, Aubrey Williams, who came to England from Guyana as part of the Windrush Generation. His work will be on display in the October Gallery in June. We were able to share our prior knowledge about the Windrush Generation from our class text ‘Windrush Child’ by Benjamin Zephaniah and also to think about how artists bring their own culture to their artwork.
We then began to think about how to represent the United Kingdom in our Artwork. We started by drawing symbols and words using candle wax and then painting over the top. As we worked, we listened to music composed by Shostakovich as that is something that Aubrey Williams listened to while he worked.
Our next Art activity was to look at a Mayan symbols, as Aubrey Williams was very inspired by Mayan symbols. We then had the opportunity to begin to create our own symbols to represent the United Kingdom using acrylic paints.
We will take our learning and our ideas back to school and then start work on our shared class artwork to represent the United Kingdom.
Many thanks to Jess and Antoinette from the October Gallery for the interesting and exciting workshop today and many thanks to all of the parents who accompanied us today. We really appreciate your support.
I really enjoyed making our own designs for how we represent the United Kingdom inspired by two artists: Aubrey Williams and Golnaz Fathi. Thank you to the teachers who organised this wonderful trip as I had an amazing time.
Todays trip was really fun. First Jess ( from the October gallery) gave us a quarter of a painting to find and match it to the correct painting. These paintings are by a artist called Golnaz Fathi, and at the moment her paintings are hung up. She has done different paintings which are very unique . Next Jess gave us a golden card to put next to our favourite painting . Once we had all done that, we all sat in a big circle and talked about our favourite painting. My favourite painting was called ‘No rain will put out this fire.’
After we had done that we were talking about a new painter from the Windrush called Aubrey Williams. I learnt that he was one of a group of artists from the Windrush generation and year 6 were inspired so we got candle wax and drew or wrote about how Britain makes us feel . Finally we were drawing symbols and painting a background . I enjoyed this workshop and I would like to go again sometime.
I really enjoyed our workshop, we looked at two different artists both of which were very interesting and I enjoyed discussing Golnaz Fathi’s art.