Happy Birthday Mr Turner!

It was great to be back in the Art Room after the Easter break, and we began our summer term of art by celebrating the 250th birthday of renowned painter JMW Turner – the face on the reverse of the £20 note! Born on 23 April 1775, Turner is widely considered to be one of the most influential British artists of all time.  Best known for painting beautiful landscapes, bold dramatic skies and epic scenes of nature, Turner travelled the length and breadth of the country, and later Europe, to capture its dramatic scenery, redefining landscape painting in the process.  Often painting outdoors, his messy, expressive style of painting and bold use of colours challenged the styles of painters before him, with many people now thinking of him as the first modern painter.  

Turner loved to paint in all kinds of weather. He was interested in the power of the natural world and the way weather patterns, as well as the light at different times of day, affected how a landscape looked and sunrises, sunsets, mists, rain and snow often feature in his work. In the Art Room this week everyone was encouraged to think about the elements when making their artworks and how this might change the colours they chose to use.

Our preschoolers made exciting ‘magic’ garden pictures of sunny and rainy days.  Using the much-loved story, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, to talk about how the weather makes the colours we see outside appear different, the children set about carefully mixing and sweeping watercolour paint onto their paper to magically reveal trees and flowers, sunshine and showers that, with the help of their grown-ups, they had first drawn onto their sheet using white, wax crayons.

Afterschool, armed with a potted history of the artist and his work, the children were inspired to paint four different landscapes like Turner showing sunny, stormy, windy and snowy conditions.  Using a photograph of Buttermere Lake in the Lake District as their starting point, a scene captured by Turner at the end of the 1790s, everyone did a great job thinking about the shape of the hills and the patches of light and dark in their scenes.  Using brighter vivid colours to show the sun shining and more subdued shades when painting the Lakeland scene under the gloom of a heavy rain cloud the end results were as wonderfully varied as the different weather patterns everyone chose to represent!