Risk

Progress involves exposing ourselves to and considering the impact or forms of danger, harm, uncertainty or opportunity.

25 May 2018

For their unit on Risk, Grade 6 and 7 students stepped outside of the box and into the paint palette feetfirst. They looked at how the abstract expressionists took creative risks in order to express their emotions and inner impulses through colour fields and brush strokes, leading to a post-war international art movement that transcended European modernism and crowned New York the new center of the art world.

In one exercise, we looked at the performative painting practices of Kazuo Shiraga, associated with the Gutai avant-garde movement and inspired by the American Abstract Expressionists. Shiraga produced his work by swinging over his canvases with a rope, creating marks with his feet. Whilst we did not swing from a rope, we certainly got our feet wet and created spontaneous, swirling, splattering abstract textures.

In another exercise, students worked together to practice the drip technique made famous by New York-based artists such as Janet Sobel and Jackson Pollock.