Summer 1
Year 3 – Portraits & Self-Portraits
This unit starts by looking at the difference between portraits and self-portraits by considering three renowned paintings: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Holbein’s Portrait of Edward VI as a Child and Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Bonito. In lesson 2 the children go on to consider a self-portrait by Van Gogh and Kehinde Wiley’s Portrait of Barak Obama, considering how each painter uses skin-tones to show light and shade on the subject’s face. In lessons 3 and 4 they go on to study self-portraits by Rembrandt and Gentileschi using these works to consider how a portrait can show much more than what a person looks like: an artist can choose to represent a person’s personality, emotions, interests and status. Whilst considering all these works, over the course of four lessons, the children paint their own self-portrait, learning about the proportions of the face, and how to recreate skin-tones. They consider how they can choose to represent themselves, by choosing what to put in the background of their portrait. They finish by evaluating what they think of the self-portrait they have created.
In lesson 5 the children go onto consider how artists can paint portraits in different styles, studying self-portraits by Picasso and some of his cubist portraits, thinking carefully about what makes these portraits look strange. In lesson 6 they study the contemporary artist Yiadom-Boakye and how she makes paintings of people, which she creates from her imagination (and doesn’t call portraits). The children use their own imaginations to create cubist-style portraits in lessons 5 and 6.
Year 4 – Monuments of the Byzantine Empire
This unit, looking at monuments of the Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, is a continuation of the work carried out in Spring B. The children revise what they know about ancient Rome and then learn about how the empire split in two, using the famous mosaic of Constantine and Justinian at the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul to discover how Constantine became the first Christian Roman emperor. They go on to learn in more detail about the history of the Hagia Sophia (built by Justinian, first used as a church and then a mosque) looking in detail at the richly coloured Byzantine patterns in it and creating their own similar patterns using watercolour and gold paint. They then study the renowned mosaics of Ravenna in Northern Italy which was for a few short years the centre of the Byzantine Empire, focussing on depictions of Justinian and his wife Theodora. They create their own mosaic portraits using paper, focussing on how to show differing skin tones, revising work done in year 2 on self-portraits. Finally, they look at icons, first painted during the Byzantine period and still painted today, learning how these are used for prayer and reflection.
Year 5 – Print Making
Children are introduced to printmaking by looking at Hogarth’s series of prints, Industry and Idleness. They consider how printmaking allows the production of many copies of one image which can be cheaply produced. They go on to consider different printmaking processes, looking at examples by famous artists: screen printing by Warhol, relief printing (in particular, wood cuts) by Hokusai and intaglio printing (dry-point and etching) by Rembrandt.
Children will already be familiar with the work of Hokusai from studying The Great Wave in the unit on Line in year 3. From this study and in the year 2 unit on Murals and Tapestries, they will have experimented with relief printing using a polystyrene block. This unit, therefore, is used as an opportunity to explore a different process: screen printing. The children design and create a stencil from which they then produce a screen print using two colours.
Year 6 – Art in the 20th Century
This final unit should be seen as a continuation of the children’s work on the impressionists and post-impressionists. The late work of Monet and the brushwork of Cezanne are considered to be forerunners of abstraction and modernism. The children start by reviewing their understanding of modernism, introduced in the unit on Style at the beginning of year 5. They then use three statues, including recent sculptures by Marc Quinn and Thomas J Price, to investigate the issue of public statuary and identity as a starting point for their own project.
The children go on to consider how Picasso developed cubism, which led to abstraction, and then explore work of significant British artists of the 20th century. They consider abstraction by looking at the work of sculptor Barbara Hepworth and painter Frank Bowling, the influence of World War II on the work of Frank Auerbach and the departure from abstraction and return to figuration in the work of Lucien Freud. Finally, they explore how art can address the issue of identity, in the work of Lubaina Himid.
This tour of important work by British artists from the 20th and 21st century is designed to inspire children independently to explore their own ideas and create a piece of work in materials of their choice about identity, as part of an extended project, to be a culmination of their year 6 work. The process of such an undertaking is explicitly taught, and uses the children’s developed skills of analytical observation, annotation, sketching, experimentation, planning and execution of a final piece.