25 April 2019
Reinforcing their previous studies on Pop Art, Grade 8 students created original gouache paintings of icons of Vietnamese popular culture. They then considered and practiced a variety of business skills and art-world conventions that practicing artists use to market and sell their work.
19 April 2019
Visit our Grade 8 Pop Art Pop-Up Shop for original artworks, prints, and postcards! Grade 8 students will sell framed and unframed original paintings as well as prints and postcards of their artwork outside the canteen from 12:35 to 1:20 pm this coming Wednesday, 24th April, and Thursday, 25th April.
26 March 2019
An extension of the Grade 6 project focusing on bee pollination, we made chalk studies of crops that bees pollinate or which grow better around bee-pollinated crops.
15 March 2019
Grade 9s and 10s transcribed various designs of Ming vases before sketching their own creative designs for a Ming-style vase. To execute their designs, they scratched into the surface of a paper primed in oil pastel in a technique called sgraffito, using design principles such as rhythm and balance to convey movement or distribute the visual weight in their designs.
11 March 2019
For our Grade 8 unit on Interpretation, we looked to a great civilization of the ancient world for their ideas on what happens to us after we die. We studied Ancient Egyptian canopic jars, vessels for storing embalmed viscera and constructed a replica in clay, learning and practising basic ceramic techniques in the process.
8 March 2019
After researching bee pollination and the consequences of colony collapse disorder, my Grade 6s constructed collages of the various fruits and vegetables that bees pollinate. They composed their designs transcribing Cézanne still life paintings and built their images up using a variety of printed patterns and textures.
1 February 2019
As we welcome the Lunar New Year and the arrival of spring, I couldn’t think of a better project to showcase than my Grade 9s’ and 10s’ Arts & Crafts-inspired decorative textile eggs. Over several weeks of design development and execution, they produced a series of colourful hand stitched designs celebrating flora, fauna, pattern, colour, and a stream of history in decorative arts.
31 January 2019
In our most recent ‘cubed painting,’ we looked at the relationship between coloured dashes in Paul Signac’s ‘The Port of Saint-Tropez.’ Dicing up the image allowed us to look closer and recreate the composition of coloured patches that interact optically and create a luminous aesthetic typical of Neo-Impressionist art.
21 January 2019
For our IMYC entry point on Consequences, we revisited a project done last year for Earth Day with its focus on plastic pollution. Working on trays from the local markets, Grade 6 students collaged blue and green pieces of plastic waste in the shapes of the world's oceans and landmasses.
7 January 2019
Whilst the Hindu festival of lights is foreign to myself and most of my students, we learned that there are many similarities between how people celebrate this and other harvest festivals throughout Asia. The festivities passed in November, but we continued working away to sculpt highly decorative clay lamps used in celebrations and rituals of Diwali.
6 December 2018
This term in Art ECA, we spent our afternoons producing a playful collaborative artwork exploding with colour and pattern. We took our inspiration from the work of Yinka Shonibare, who uses waxprint in his work, drawing on their popularity as “authentically African” fabrics and calling attention to their origins through English and Dutch colonial trade routes.
22 November 2018
For our Grade 6 unit on Creativity, I pulled this delicious construction project from my previous work in Primary because it is a good illustration how the creative process works. And what can be more satisfying to create than our own home? Especially one made of sweets!
6 November 2018
We looked to Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Garbage series and how the monumental portraits he made with and of garbage pickers transformed how they thought of themselves. We then borrowed from Muniz’s use of quotidian objects, using ground coffee to create high contrast portraits of the members of our class community.
1 October 2018
We started with one type of Northwest Coast art - totem poles - to examine totem animals, both real and legendary, and their meanings within these communities, as well as the formal qualities that make Northwest Coast art so easily recognisable amongst the artwork of indigenous North American peoples.
30 September 2018
We started the year with some punchy, delicious art references from the work of Wayne Thiebaud. Grade 6 students researched and transcribed Thiebaud’s Three Machines, and Grade 8 students looked at other paintings of mass culture and production line objects as they learned more about what Pop Art is and how it was challenging to the art world of the 1950s and 1960s.
22 June 2018
The year is up, and my walls are empty again. My last post this year is dedicated to my Grade 12 leavers, who had just enough time this spring to begin and finish painting transcriptions of Yayoi Kusama’s numerous pumpkin paintings.
25 May 2018
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.
18 April 2018
In a one-off activity day in celebration of Earth Day, we learned more about the consequences of having so much plastic available everywhere, from straws and cutlery to bottles and shopping bags. We then spent a few hours creating some visual poetry in the hopes of inspiring a change in our attitude and behavior about plastics.
2 April 2018
We explored the design principle of rhythm through the work of Van Gogh, whose dedication to articulating the inner spirituality of nature resulted in a dramatic fusion of rhythm, colour and imagination. We practiced the impulsive, gestural application of paint before moving on to transcriptions and finally creating Van Gogh-esque images of Vietnamese landscapes.
16 March 2018
I wanted my kids to cleanse their palette and experience the meditative joy of working with materials like felt and wool, and sequins, buttons, and beads. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I revisited an old project that turned out to be a surprise success with my Year 2s in a previous school. As I expected, the kids spun gold from thread in sugary sweet images of sliced fruits and vegetables.
