This week has been art week and we've linked it with 'Black History Month' where we've focused on the Empire Windrush and how a lot of people from the Caribbean moved over to Britain having taken up offers to fill much-needed jobs. Britain was short of workers having just come out of WW2 and wanted to get rebuilding our towns and cities. We looked at what life was like in the Caribbean and learnt about the journeys people made to get here. We researched the passenger list of the Windrush to investigate just who was making this brave move to come over and live in foreign lands to begin a new life. Now here's where our art begins; we looked at a British artist called Hurvin Anderson, whose parents came from the Caribbean. He would hear stories of his parents homelands, of its vibrant colours and exotic scenes and used this to influence his art pieces, creating images from hazy ideas he'd imagine from their tales. His work is known as abstract art and it involved adding layers, and using a range of methods to create texture and depth. Mrs Lyall kindly offered to model some examples to the children of ways they can apply paint without the use of a paintbrush. We used all sorts of things from: combs, bubble wrap to cocktail sticks. We then drew some pencil sketches of some scenes of the Caribbean We looked at how Hurvin uses multiple shades of colour and how this brings movement and depth to his work and practised creating different colours in our works. We then began applying paint to our sketches Here are our finished pieces! After all the fun in art, we also thought about what other cultural experiences can the Caribbean offer - we know that the steel drums are a popular instrument and it just so happens that we have a steel drum set. With the worry of having to demonstrate myself, I remembered how Mrs Hickingbotham was a dab hand at the steel drums so invited her back to come and lead a session. First she told us about her own Caribbean routes and then taught us some calypso songs to drum along to with our new found steel drum skills. We had the best time! We've had lots of fun this week and have hung our art shirts up until the next time!
Have a nice weekend