In the first lesson we looked at Jackson Pollock. I told pupils to take a black “paint brush” and “take it for a walk across the screen in curved pathways”. We then experimented with “infilling” some of the spaces.

In the second week we investigated Piet Mondrian. We talked about vertical and horizontal lines and squares and rectangles, and used the line tool to create horizontal and vertical designs. We filled these in using primary colours, and discussed what these were and what was meant by the term.

In the third week it was the turn of Henri Matisse. We looked at his painting of a snail, focusing on the word “spiral”. The Tate Gallery website was useful here; it builds the picture up piece by piece.

Using the “shapes” tool the children created their own snail pictures. In the top left-hand corner of Matisse’s painting is a tiny snail. Children were fascinated by this and many of them incorporated a secret snail of their own in their pictures. In the fourth week we looked at aboriginal art. The children used the spray tool to build up their pictures with dots in earth colours. Our fifth artist was Georgia O’Keefe, and children used the symmetry function to created large blooms based on her work.

In the final lesson, I showed them the work of Wassily Kandinsky and they used all the tools and the skills they had learned to create a “Kandinsky” of their own like Year 2 pupil Katie Howard’s, shown below. They learned myriad skills and the work produced was very good. Websites we found particularly useful were:

www.nationalgallery.org.uk

www.tate.org.uk www.commondrian

Pat Dowsing

Deputy head and KS1 leader, Trinity St Mary’s Primary School, South Woodham Ferrers, Essex