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Rainforest Mural at Dogsthorpe Junior School – The Movie
6 – 27.6.14
Dogsthorpe Academy, Central Avenue, Dogsthorpe ,Peterborough PE1 4LH
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Rainforest Mural at Dogsthorpe Junior School
6 – 27.6.14
On 1st April I received an email message from Charlotte Krzanicki, Head of Dogsthorpe Junior School ‘I have a project for you to get your teeth into!’ It could have simply been an April Fool gag, but intrigued by the invitation I called her bluff and we arranged a date for a meeting later in the month.
When I arrived at the school on the morning of 22nd April I found Charlotte in her office and was surprised and very pleased to find she had also invited fellow artist and chum Katie Smith along too. A few years ago we had seen each other quite regularly and got on very well, but then ‘Black Sunday’ intervened and we’ve not had the opportunity to work together since. If Katie was going to be involved, then I knew that whatever project Charlotte was about to propose it was going to be a winner.
After a catch-up chat Charlotte took us for a walk around the school, passing through a long and very white hospital corridor. Some image making workshops were suggested but the main purpose of my visit was to be shown this long tunnel which Charlotte had a vision of being transformed into a Rainforest.
My task was to paint the space and Katie was to be involved with a 3D project with groups of children to produce some large sculptures which would be installed in the corridor when the painting was completed.
A collection of trees could be seen through the windows and Charlotte wanted the garden area and the feeling of outdoors to be continued into the school itself. When asked how long it would take I must have been drunk with the thought of being offered my largest painting project ever when I rashly suggested ‘about a week’. What was I thinking??!!! The corridor measured 75′ x 7′ x 7′ and I had suggested painting both walls and the ceiling.
Work began on 6th June when I arrived at school at 8.45 and immediately went out with Estelle, the school site manager, on a shopping trip for painting materials and on our return I began work in earnest making the first marks on the wall. That first morning I quickly learned what impact this project might have when I overheard a couple of children speaking to each other at one end of the corridor, “Do you think the teachers know there’s a man scribbling on the walls down there?”
On day 3 I was accompanied in enthusiastic fashion by the assistance of children from year 6, who worked with me on a rotation basis arriving in groups of half a dozen at a time. On that day the walls changed from an ice white into a range of colours suggesting a rainforest floor. The change was immediate. As soon as one entered the corridor the space already felt completely different. It is very difficult to describe in words but the atmosphere had altered significantly and the painting was still at a very early stage.
Over the course of the next week I worked alone but the painting progressed very quickly. My approach to painting has always been to work fast in order to capture the moment and working with large mural projects is no different, and once I’m ‘in the zone’ time completely disappears as my concentration levels rise. Nevertheless, five days of painting soon passed and my ‘safety net’ day became used up too. I had a commitment to begin a project at Newark Hill Academy the next day and I wasn’t prepared to break that promise. I had to leave the corridor in an unfinished state. Frustrated and irritated, these words are much too inadequate to describe how I felt on leaving the painting incomplete – and in a public space too!
The following week I returned to the corridor and with another day and a half of painting I had found a conclusion. A Rainforest has been established and with it 37 creatures to track down. From start to finish my original estimate for painting the corridor was not so far out after all, ‘about a week’ actually turned out to be eight and a half days.
Image making workshops at Dogsthorpe Junior School
– Landscape & Seascape
22 & 23.5.14
A couple of days working with children from year 4 at Dogsthorpe Junior School, Peterborough, to generate some ‘Landscape’ and ‘Seascape’ images following an invitation from Head Teacher Charlotte Krzanicki. The first day was spent using charcoal, the second chalk pastel.
I met with three groups of 30 children each day and sessions took a similar format, I displayed a couple of my own charcoal and chalk pastel drawings in the room so that the children could identify a comparison with my regular working practise and I also worked alongside them to produce a drawing too while they made theirs. We began by making an initial investigation and exploration of working with the medium which was followed by the production of a more finished drawing as a conclusion. However, although each group received the same introduction their end piece was a different subject.
In my own working practise as a painter I often produce interpretations of the work of others which I refer to as ‘Souvenirs’, a term stolen from Hercules Brabazon Brabazon, a nineteenth century artist who produced some wonderful watercolours of paintings he had seen and admired. The concluding piece for each group therefore was to produce a variation on the work of a Master, however rather than showing an illustration of a painting and making a slavish copy I described a scene and asked them to picture it in their mind before we worked together to make our interpretation of it.
Working on a board which they could all see at the front of the class to produce my own version I suggested a series of stages in which the drawing could be constructed. We drew a portion of the composition, followed by another, until the sections pieced together into a picture. The children were totally oblivious of the painting they were creating or its title until it was finished, and after their teacher had searched for it on the internet it was revealed to be shown to them at the end which made for an interesting comparison.
Day 1 had a ‘Landscape’ theme and the painting I selected for the first class was ‘Christina’s World‘ by Andrew Wyeth, for the second one of the many compositions of ‘Mont Sainte-Victoire‘ by Paul Cezanne and ‘Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows‘ by John Constable for the afternoon group.
The theme for Day 2 was ‘Seascape’, with the first group producing a variation of ‘Snow Storm; Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth‘ and the second ‘Peace – Burial At Sea‘, both by JMW Turner, with the afternoon group tackling ‘The Cliff, Etretat, Sunset‘ by Claude Monet.
All the children made brave attempts with their image making and some successful images emerged. Unfortunately I didn’t photograph the children’s work so the examples illustrated here are the images I produced while leading each of the groups…………..
Nevertheless, these sunset images after Monet were all produced by the children and are a selection from the last group of the day. Considering it was a Friday afternoon and the last session before breaking up for half term, I think they produced some pretty breathtaking drawings!
