Art

The most important objective of our art program at Westfield Friends School is to create an atmosphere of encouragement, enthusiasm, and acceptance for the creative efforts of every one of our students. We encourage all our students to use their imagination in the creative arts, with a belief that there is artistic ability in every child that can be nurtured and developed.

Classes for the younger years are designed to introduce students to the skills and tools of creative expression. Through a variety of media and processes such as drawing, painting, printmaking, modeling, color mapping and discussion of art history and famous artists, students begin to understand, develop and appreciate their own artistic voice as well as that of others.

In the older years, we seek to introduce our students to an even broader range of experiences and media, emphasizing problem solving, aesthetic decision-making, inventive thinking, craftsmanship, and risk taking through creative studio processes.

Our students artwork is displayed continuously, and reflects various themes and work that has been covered across the year - in our past few terms, work inspired by artists as varied as Mondrian, Monet and Picasso have formed vivid exhibitions throughout the school.

All the children are exposed to the interrelationships among all the art forms, and drama, music and the arts are combined in our students’ projects. A highlight of our last term was the Seventh Grade art performance piece about synesthesia - the ability to see color in music and vice versa. Famous synesthesia composers and artists include Miles Davis, Wassily Kandinsky, and Franz Liszt. The students were assigned a color to study, and learnt about its relationships within the 12-step hue wheel before creating a mask of their face, which was then decorated with variations of their specific color hue. With the assistance of our music teacher, the students then participated in a performance in front of the school in their masks, describing their color hue, using twelve etudes composed by Alexander Laszlo.