Curwen’s Art and Design vision is to encourage pupil creativity and self-expression in understanding and responding to the world, and to support the application of this to pupils’ learning, social development and wider life.

Art and Design is all about children experimenting, designing and expressing themselves in a visual way. This includes looking at the world around them, learning about artists, art techniques and other cultures, and responding by making their own artworks.

How can you help your child?

• Build up a range of drawing and making materials at home, such as pencils, paints, glue and sellotape. These can be very cheap and are often easily found in pound shops. Let them do art activities at home, such as drawing, painting and using junk boxes to make models.
• Draw pictures with your child. It is good for children to see how adults draw too.
• Talk to your child about how things are made and why they look like they do. Talk about how they think things can be improved. Ask questions about how the artist made the work and why they have chosen to do things
•  Talk about and let your child find out about famous artists, crafts people and architects. Encourage your child to be inspired by art and design that they have seen. Can they use techniques or styles they have seen to make their own art work?
• Visit art galleries and design museums, and look at buildings around your local area. 
• Encourage your child to collect pictures they like from magazines and catalogues. They can cut or rip pictures out and glue them onto paper or into a sketchbook.

Experience art with your family

There are lots of art galleries and museums in London that you can visit with your family, and some of them are free to enter.

Following your gallery visit, children can:

• Have a discussion about the artworks they have seen
• Use artwork as inspiration to create their own art
• Research an artist whose art work they saw and found interesting
• Make collaborative artwork with family members
• Look up a technique that they have seen at the gallery and try it for themselves
• Whitechapel Gallery
• William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow
• Victoria and Albert Museum
• Tate Modern / Tate Britain
• National Gallery
• National Portrait Gallery
• Hayward Gallery
• The Barbican

Curwen is delighted to have been awarded Artmark Gold

 

Art Website Update (KS1: Years 1 and 2;  LKS2: 3 and 4)

Art has got off to a great start so far this year across the school!

In year 1, they have been looking at self-portraits using a variety of mediums. Using clay, they have been creating sculptural representations of themselves using different tools to help shape their nose and eyebrows. Another medium they explored was paint! They used pencil portraits to paint over and gathered inspiration from artists such as Frida Kahlo, Hom Ngyuen and Pablo Picasso.

One of these artists in particular (Frida Kahlo) used many symbolisms. Year 1 reproduced some of her work by including symbolisms of things they liked on one side of their portrait and their self-portrait on the other side.

Year 1 parents were then invited into the school to view a self-portrait gallery to enjoy the amazing work that year 1 had produced.

  

This years Arts Ambassadors are:

Anay- 4M

Anhaa - 4C 

Levana - 4C 

Acacia - 4A 

Blessing - 5C

Heaven - 5L

Aaminah - 5B 

Heather - 6R​

In year 2, the Children have been taking inspiration from their focus artist Chris Ofili. His art piece “No Woman No Cry” stimulated their own creativity as they had a go at creating their own mixed media art piece. Ofili used many dots in his painting as well as the technique of collage, so the children used their prior knowledge of colour mixing to portray a link between colours and emotions. They also used crayons, pain and collage to create a final piece.

 

 

Year 3 began the year creating observational drawings-using leaves and materials of autumn as their focus. From this, they explored how to create shading and tone with techniques such as cross-hatching. They linked their artwork to what they were learning in Topic (The Stone Age) and used the shapes and images from their observational drawing to create stencils for printing. Using the stencils and paint, they created a repeated pattern, inspired by stencil work and printed art like that of The Stone Age.

They then moved on to learn about Ancient Egyptian art, again linking to what they have been learning about in topic. They explored the work of an Egyptian artist Reda Abdel Rahman. Pupils closely observed the art and learnt how Egyptian has no perspective and all images appear flat with little depth. They developed their understanding of drawing a two-dimensional image and learnt about wax resist technique using watercolours. They used different resources to create their art piece such as water paints, pastel and skin tone colours.

 

Year 4 have also made cross-curricular links to their history topics and the artwork they have produced this year. Using a range of mixed media, the children used clay to create their own Roman artefacts including pottery and busts. They also experimented with using small pieces of coloured paper to create intricate Roman mosaic designs.

When learning about Ancient Benin in History, the children closely observed the artwork and artefacts and created detailed observational drawings of them. When looking at the Benin Bronzes currently found in the British museum, the children researched to understand what certain animals (such as crocodiles and leopards) represented. Using this concept, they considered their own animal symbolisms to show different parts of their personality. Using a range of shading techniques, they created their own plaques that represented themselves using pencil, charcoal and graphite to add depth, shadows and highlights.