Serious artists at work

Bring on the artists! We think that we are artists and our teachers often tell us that when we are making something, we do not need to finish it straight away as artists create works in progress. This we understand as we have done this and especially in the upstairs class, we work on the same thing for days and some of us like to go back and work on them even a week later. Understanding art can be tricky though. Sometimes artists give a title to a painting that they have made and when people come and look at it, they see something else. And this is fine. We trust that whoever sees our works of art, will enjoy them and see in them whatever they want to. We are in the throes of working on our canvasses which will be auctioned at the Wine Tasting event on Sunday 20th January.

Downstairs we are creating contemporary art works and we are thrilled that we have completed one of them. The first one was done using Autumn shades like red, yellow, orange and brown. It is rich in colours and today we pasted on some mosaic shapes and some corrugated cardboard. This was done in order to create more texture on it. Shelley finished it off later during the day using Shellac which we are not allowed to use. It has made our painting shiny and we are sure that someone will fall in love with it and want it in their home as a piece of art. The second painting we just started today. We used purple and a deep magenta pink which we put on the canvas using our hands as well as large paint brushes. We discovered a treasure chest of art materials in Shelley’s art trolley which she brought to school today. She has brushes of varying sizes, texturing tools, spatulas, paints, photographs, newspaper, coloured paper and more. Our second art work will be with photos and paint and ………………

 We listened to the story of the “Three Billy Goats Gruff” on a CD. Usually our teachers read books to us however this time we listened to someone’s voice telling us the story. We think that we prefer it when we can see the book with the pictures in it so that we can relate to the animals, people or creatures more readily. Nanako read “We’re going on a bear hunt” to us when we were sitting on the mat. We sat with her and our friends just before music time. During music time we selected some instruments and did actions, movements and sang to the music. The one thing we loved a lot was when we made a train; first we sat together and all pretended to drive the train; then we stood up and walked around the room; ran around the room; galloped around the room; hopped and jumped as well. We had snack time at a little table which was nice and intimate.

Upstairs, we were lucky to have some time to play outside before the rains came. Some of us played “What’s the time Mr. Wolf?” and the rest of us ran around and climbed the slide from the bottom. Parts of the park were a little damp from the very early morning rain.

 When we came back from the park, we continued working on our art works for our first canvas. Working on M.C. Escher like paintings takes a long time and we are doing our very best. Darren pasted some of them onto the canvas and we are seeing our work of art take shape, slowly. We read a wonderful story called “Professor Cockatoo’s Amazing Weather Dust”. This story was about a cockatoo that develops a dust that will bring rain to end the drought in Australia. However the dust causes snowstorms, lightening and other terrible weather conditions.

During circle time, we made a circle and pretended that we were on the plains of Africa. We pretended that we were elephant’s drinking water from a water hole. We sucked the water up with our trunks and then a crocodile came so we had to move in order to avoid the dangerous crocodile. We were hippos and rhinos but we all had to be careful of the crocodile in the water. He had very sharp white teeth and a huge mouth. We enjoy dramatizing and pretending is so much fun.

We were happy to come back to school after the weekend. Some of friends who had been ill returned as well as some who were on holiday.

We look forward to doing more work on our art and feel excited knowing that the canvasses are going to evolve into ……………………..

Love always Shelley, Darren, Nanako, Ayaka, Christine, Goh, Liezel and Sabine.

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