Brize Norton Primary School
Art at Brize

COUNTRY PARK SHIRE HORSES

17TH JUNE

On the 17th June the School Council and Year 6 met David Cameron when they attended the unveiling of the Shire horse sculptures on The Kilkenny Country Park. Last year Sophie Thompson, the sculptor commissioned by West Oxfordshire District Council, worked with all of our children to create mod roc sculptures for our school grounds. She showed us how she uses reclaimed materials to create life-size sculptures. The horses we made were displayed at the opening. It was a great honour to take part in this wonderful project and event.

THE CASE OF THE MISSING PAINTING

NOVEMBER 2010 (revised)

See more photo here.

This term we have been working on an exciting whole school topic, 'The Case of the Missing Painting'.  After half term the children returned to school to discover that a painting was missing from our Vincent van Gogh bedroom (The Room at Arles). We were very quickly visited by PC McCarthy who set the children their first challenge as detectives to find out who lived in the room and which painting was missing.

The children eagerly set to work researching facts about Vincent van Gogh, to use in their writing. In art the children worked on colour mixing and tried to replicate the style of van Gogh. The children used their observational features to paint self-portraits. By the end of the week the children had discovered that the missing painting was a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh himself. PC McCarthy was very impressed.

The second challenge given to the children was to work out who had taken the painting. This was introduced by a forensic expert. All members of staff were suspects and were under close scrutiny by the children. The children carried out surveys and many science investigations to eliminate many of the suspects. This also required Class 4 children to visit Burford Secondary School to use the science laboratory, to distil soup amongst other things.

On Tuesday 23rd November, the children in Class 4 revealed who had stolen the painting. It was the boiler engineer! During the day a mystery parcel was found at the front door, marked urgent. Unwrapping the parcel, the children discovered that the missing painting had been returned with a message from the culprit.

The topic has been enjoyed by all children and even the parents have not been able to stop talking about who took the painting!

COUNTRY PARK ART PROJECT

JULY 2010

Over several weeks we have been working with the sculptor Sophie Thompson, to create some large horses to go in our school grounds. Sophie Thompson has been commissioned to provide public art at the Kilkenny Lane Country Park, where she will be creating two life size shire horses using reclaimed metal. Our horses are made using a metal frame, newspaper and modroc. We had to think very carefully about the movements the horses make and how we could show this in our sculptors. Visit Sophie Thomson here. See more photos here.

TAKE ONE PICTURE ART WEEK

MARCH 2010

Following a staff training day at the National Gallery in January, all classes have been involved with the ‘Take One Picture’ project. This year the focus painting is Tobias and the Angel by the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. During the week the children studied the painting  across a range of subjects. Amongst other things, Foundation Stage made castles, Year 1 children made cures for blindness and wrote their own instructions, Year 2 created angel wings and wrote some fantastic poems, Year 3 and 4 created their own egg tempera paintings and Year 5 and 6 created abstract art based on their interpretation of the painting. It was a great week with all children questioning the painting and challenging themselves to further what they could see and find out.  More information about the painting can be found here.