Before the half term break, our Year 11, 12 and 13 artists were lucky to embark on a gallery-packed day to the National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery in London. The following is a writeup courtesy of Head of Art, Miss Jiggens:
We started the morning off with a brilliant drawing workshop at the National Portrait Gallery, where the students were shown several portraits and developed an understanding of how identity can be portrayed in a piece of work. They then did a brilliant activity interviewing each other on pieces of work in the Romantics Room. It was great to see all the students so engaged.
After the workshop, the students explored the National Portrait Gallery and I have to say that the Blood Head by Marc Quinn evoked the most curiosity. After lunch, we took the short walk over to the National Gallery where the students then spent the afternoon exploring the rooms and viewing the artwork. It was brilliant to the students' reactions of the pieces they have seen before but not in real life such as Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Claude Monet’s Waterlilies with reactions such as ‘look at the colours’, ‘that is much more impactful in real life’ and ‘it so much bigger than I thought’ being heard. We look forward to seeing how the students are inspired by the artists when we get back to school.
A big thank you to Miss Platt, Mrs Brooks and Mr Gover for their great support on the day.
Year 12 Art Scholar, Sophie Woodeson, adds:
On the recent art trip to London, we visited the National Portrait Gallery as well as the National Gallery - these are in Trafalgar Square backed onto each other. During our visit to the National Portrait Gallery, we attended a workshop which looked at the theme of identity shown through portraiture. One particular piece of art which we studied was called Sadie created by Toyin Ojih Odutola. This piece is a modern piece of art which has several deeper meanings behind it, which are small glimpse into Sadie’s life. These consist of a reflection of palm leaves which is linking her portrait to her Jamaican heritage, as well as a large map of Northwest London which is where she now lives. Her position in the portrait shows that she is a powerful and talented on her own terms.
Overall, the day was very enjoyable as we were able to look at many different styles and centuries of work. We were also able to explore the galleries in our own time as well as sketch the pieces as we wondered around which allowed us to build up our portfolios. Seeing the art in real life suspired me as some of the pieces were huge and way bigger than I have imagined. There were also some pieces that were very small and detailed. However, the piece called View of the Westerkerk, Amsterdam by Jan van der Hayden was a moderate sized piece, around A2, that was very detailed and mimicked the details of a photograph. This overall was my favourite piece as I was mesmerised with how much detail the artist had managed to create from the buildings in the background to the cobbled stones in the foreground.
