Our current exhibition at St. Julian's Palacio

I wish to share with you a few pages from our school magazine with examples of work from year 6 to year 9, which are now on display in our gallery in the Palacio. These pages were published on the Lighthouse magazine two weeks ago.

Drawing bottles and glasses

Today I found these images of last summer's year 9 internal art exams . We ask students to draw a bottle and a glass using a pencil. They have one hour and 20 minutes to do it and we ask them to try to apply all the techniques they have learned to the best of their ability. We then mark them on specific criteria such as quality of line, shading, mark making, composition etc. Looking at these I am impressed with how our students can draw at this age.

Black, white and the paper in the middle...

One of the most effective ways of teaching our young pupils how to observe light and shadow when looking at three dimensional objects and then how to reproduce that observation onto a drawing is the following:

 - Use black and white drawing materials (chalk and charcoal work very well)
 - Work on coloured paper (make sure the colour is lighter than the black and darker than the white material you draw with).
 - Draw only the darkest shadows and the lightest spots of light.
 - Always leave paper in between the black and the white.

 Et Voilà!

A series of drawings by year 8 students (I swear!):

The simplest printing method

Sometimes the simplest methods can lead to the most exciting results. Below are a couple of prints (please forgive the bad quality photos, but they were the only ones I could find) make by simply inking objects (leaves) with a roller and squashing them in the etching press. They were made by year 8 students. You should only use flat and reasonably soft objects for this kind of experiment or you might damage the press in the process.

Ceramics in year 8

Awhile ago, in 2009, we explored ceramics in year 8, as we usually do in most year groups actually. I used a portuguese artist called Rafael Bordallo Pinheiro as a source of inspiration. Most people in Portugal are extremely familiar with this common design:

 Bordallo Pinheiro designed the well known cabbage motif that exists in the shape of bowls and plates but that was just a simple and more commercial design which has been produced in mass in the well known factory of Caldas da Raínha. Bordallo Pinheiro was also a very famous satirical cartoonist in the late 19th century. (look at examples of his work here)
I focused on more elaborate pieces such as the ones below, to inspire ou year 8 students to create their own pots and decorate them with animal or vegetable elements.

Here are the fabulous pots our talented students created:

 

 

 

Art, Science,Technology...and all those boxes

Theo Jansen

Cross-hatching

Giorgio Morandi (Italian, 1890–1964)

Still Life

Date:

1927

Medium:

Etching

Hatching is an essential skill for printing and we teach it to our younger students in year 7. One of the artists we have used to help students understand how to create a variety of textures and tones using a high contrast markmaking device (more specifically, a pen), is Giorgio Morandi. We choose him because he works in still life (as we do with our students in this project) but also because his hatching technique is quite simple compared to a more elaborate style such as what is present in Piranesi's etchings. Here are some of the best works I have photographed last year:

This is a very skilled girl in year 7 who made a serious effort to observe light and shadow and depict a variety of tones using cross-hatching

Carceri Plate VII - The Drawbridge.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Untitled etching (called "The Drawbridge"), plate VII (of 16) from the series The Imaginary Prisons (Le Carceri d'Invenzione), Rome, 1761 edition (reworked from 1745).

Another y7 example, in this case, with a more disorganised style, but very effective.

Dear Naum Gabo:

 

Dear Naum Gabo,
 A few years ago I presented your "Head no. 2"(see below) to some of my young students and marvelled at how quickly they understood how to create volume and form using flat sections (in my case....of card). Here are some of their heads:

Naum GaboHead No. 2 1916, enlarged version 1964
Tate modern

 

 

Shoe-ducks

Earlier this year, year 8 students explored surrealism and learned how to make collograph prints and incorporate them in a surrealist composition:

A "shoe-duck" by one of our year 8 students

Year 8 Sculpture project

Year 8 has been working with cardboard and clay to produce sculptures of objects following a building process that is inspired on the work of Naum Gabo (see Naum Gabo post). Here are some examples of the sculptures and the beautiful watercolours they are also creating using Morandi as an inspiration.

On the 9th of March, early in the morning, this year 8 class dived into this task with admirable skill and concentration. More than admirable, it was, so far, never seen. Well done year 8!

Naum Gabo

Naum Gabo was associated with the Constructivists at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917. They saw an artistic renewal as part of the revolution and embraced new scientific theories and industrial materials. A method known as 'stereometric construction' was central to Gabo's work, by which form was achieved through the description of space rather than the establishment of mass. He declared in 1920: 'we take four planes and we construct with them the same volume as of four tons of mass.' In 1915-20 Gabo used planes to construct heads and figures that demonstrated the application of this method to traditional subjects. 'Head No.2' is a later enlargement of the most dramatic of these models.
(From the display caption August 2004)From - Tate Modern Collection.



American sculptor of Belorussian birth. He was brought up in the Russian town of Bryansk, where his father owned a metallurgy business. Early paintings display his romantic and literary spirit, for example Self-portrait (c. 1907–10; artist’s family priv. col., see 1986 exh. cat., pl. 128), but in 1910 he went to the University of Munich to study medical and scientific subjects (1910–12), then philosophy and history of art (1912–14). The lectures of Heinrich Wölfflin and the writings of Henri Bergson were significant influences on him at this time. Gabo also studied engineering at the Technische Hochschule, Munich (1912–14), where there was a large collection of mathematical models. During World War I he took refuge in Norway (1914–17) and started working with his ‘stereometric method’ of construction, one of several techniques he adopted from such models, and through which he made a significant contribution to the development of the language of Constructivism. This enabled him to make images from sheet materials such as cardboard, plywood and galvanized iron, incorporating space in the body of the work and thereby denying the solidity of matter. Around this time he adopted the surname Gabo to distinguish himself from his brother, the artist antoine Pevsner.

Gabo’s first constructed works were figurative (e.g. Constructed Head No. 2, 1916; London, artist’s family priv. col., see 1986 exh. cat., p. 92), but following his return to Russia in 1917 he started to make non-figurative reliefs and towers from transparent plastic and glass. Column (144 mm; London, Tate), his most important architectonic sculpture of this period, was conceived in the winter of 1920–21 as a celluloid model. As he intended with most of his works, Gabo enlarged this construction several times. (There is a 1.05 m version in New York, Guggenheim, and a 1.93 m version in Humlebæk, Louisiana Mus.; both measurements include an integral base.) In 1920, in conjunction with an open-air exhibition on Tverskoy Boulevard, Gabo, together with his brother, published his Realistic Manifesto, summarizing his views on art. As with all Gabo’s writings this manifesto is poetically forceful and was highly influential. Rejecting Cubism and Futurism Gabo called for an art for a new epoch, a public art recognizing space and time as its basic elements and espousing construction and kineticism. These ideas are embodied in Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave, 1919–20; London, Tate).

In 1922 Gabo travelled to Berlin in connection with the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung, held at the Van Diemen Gallery, in which he was well-represented with about ten works. There he met Katherine S. Dreier, his first important patron, and he soon came into contact with many artists and architects, such as Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters, Hugo Häring, the brothers Hans and Wassili Luckhardt and artists of the Bauhaus. Throughout the 1920s Gabo continued to employ glass, metal (sometimes painted black or white) and plastics in his works, which remained architectonic or monumental in conception (for illustration see Plastic). He also designed a stage set for Diaghilev’s ballet La Chatte (model in London, Tate), first performed in Monte Carlo in 1927, and in 1931 he submitted plans to the competition for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. In 1930 he had an important one-man show at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover, and in 1931 he became a member of the group Abstraction–Création in Paris.

By 1933 Gabo had moved to Paris, but in 1935 he made a brief visit to London, where he settled in 1936. There he made friends with Herbert Read, and with Leslie Martin and Ben Nicholson, with whom in 1937 he edited Circle. Through Dr John Sisson, Gabo was introduced to perspex, the new plastic developed by Imperial Chemical Industries that he employed in some of his best-known works, such as Translucent Variation on Spheric Theme (1937; New York, Guggenheim) and Spiral Theme (1941; London, Tate). Gabo made over 20 free-standing variations on the basic ‘spheric’ theme, differing in size and materials. More elaborate developments include Model for ‘Spheric Construction: Fountain’ (1937/8; London, artist’s family priv. col.), Bas-relief on a Circular Surface, Semi-spheric (1938; Paris, priv. col.) and Construction in Space, with Net (1952; London, artist’s family priv. col.). During World War II Gabo lived in Cornwall (1939–46), and there he started using nylon monofilament as in his works entitled Linear Construction in Space (e.g. Linear Construction in Space No. 1 (variation), 1942–3; London, Tate). Materials were in short supply during the war, but Gabo was able to continue to paint and carve. In 1943 he was commissioned through the Design Research Unit to design a car for the Jowett Car Company. In 1946 Gabo moved to the USA, where he became a close friend of Lewis Mumford. Following a major exhibition of his works in New York in 1948, he began to receive commissions for public projects. The first of these, for the Esso Building at the Rockefeller Center (1949), New York, remained unexecuted, but in 1951 he completed his Construction Suspended in Space for the Baltimore Museum of Art. There followed an important commission for the Bijenkorf Construction in Rotterdam (h. c. 25 m, 1956–7), through which Gabo intended to celebrate the reconstruction of the city following World War II. Ultimately related to the ‘spheric theme’, this work was developed directly from his entry to the international competition for which he submitted a Model for a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner (410 mm, 1952; London, Tate), which gained one of the five second prizes. In the early 1950s Gabo took up wood-engraving, which he used until the mid-1970s to explore the same concepts as his sculpture (see 1986 exh. cat., p. 190).

Gabo’s work does not fit simply into the machine aesthetic. As he wrote in 1957: ‘Not the Machine—the creative spirit of man is my inspiration’. An artist of diverse interests, Gabo was fascinated and influenced by scientific and mathematical images, whether visually or verbally described, and particularly by the enigmas of science. While he valued supremely the autonomy of the artist, he also sought to integrate not only sculpture, architecture and design but also art and science. Thus he felt that his ‘constructive idea’ could serve as a philosophy not only for art but for life in general.

Colin C. Sanderson
From Grove Art Online

© 2007 Oxford University Press

Y9 Cubist Paintings

Some examples of the work year 9 produced in the first term