Tag: painting
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Weird Details: Medieval Marginalia Reimagined
Medieval manuscripts are famous for their beauty, gold leaf, and devotional imagery. Yet hidden in the margins of these sacred pages lives another world entirely. Tiny hybrid creatures, mischievous animals, musical skeletons, and knights battling snails populate the edges of medieval art with strange humour and subversive imagination. As writer Olivia M. Swarthout observes in…
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JOSEF ALBERS: LEARNING TO SEE THROUGH COLOR
Grade 4 Elementary School Project, November 2025Color is a tricky companion. It shifts, deceives, glows, and hides, depending on what sits beside it. No one understood this better than Josef Albers, one of the great teachers of the twentieth century. Albers spent decades exploring how colors speak to one another, how one hue can appear…
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From Leaf to Light: The Mosaic Drawing
This project began with a simple act: stepping outside. Students walked through the school grounds as autumn slipped toward winter, searching the ground for fallen leaves. They became observers of seasonal change, noticing how time reshapes the natural world. Some leaves were torn by wind, some freckled by decay, some filled with intricate networks of…
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IB Visual Arts × MAXXI, 1+1: Relational Art
Our IB Visual Arts students spent the day inside the living architecture of MAXXI. From the moment they stepped inside, the space asked them to slow down and look differently. This was not a gallery of still objects. It was a set of encounters waiting to happen. Students gathered in clusters, pointing, comparing, mapping the…
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Where Does the Art Live?
Grade 9 History of Art | Light, Space, and Perception In this Grade 9 History of Art project, students stepped into the worlds of James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, artists who shape perception through light, space, and the quiet drama of seeing. Instead of beginning with monumental installations, the class began with something intimate: a…
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Seeing Rome Through the Eyes of a Realist
This project challenged students to capture modern Rome through the lens of Realism, asking: If a Realist artist were alive today, how would they depict the city? Drawing from the tradition of 19th-century Realist painters like Courbet, Daumier, and Millet, who rejected idealization in favor of documenting ordinary life, students explored contemporary urban environments with…
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Elementary Art as a Process of Discovery
In this series of drawings by our Elementary School students, we encounter a unique form of expression that is both immediate and highly individual. The drawings reveal a natural process of visual exploration where each line, shape, and color becomes a tool for discovery. In these early stages, young artists engage with art as a…
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‘Whispers Island’: A Contemporary Art Journey for Students
We are thrilled to announce the launch of Whispers Island—an educational resource now available on Instagram, designed specifically to enrich the learning experience of our art students. This carefully curated collection of contemporary art images offers an immersive, dynamic learning space. At Whispers Island, students are not just viewing a gallery of modern works—they are…
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Vivid Emotions: A journey through Post-Impressionist Pastel Work
Our latest classroom project, titled ‘Post-Impressionism Blow My Mind’ invited students to delve into the world of Post-Impressionism, creating vibrant and emotionally charged artworks using chalk pastels. The goal was to encourage students to explore both the internal and external landscapes of their chosen subjects, emphasizing expressive color, distinctive mark-making, and the potential for exaggerated…
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Elementary Art Project: Exploring the Elements of Art
In our elementary school’s innovative art program, students delve into the fundamental elements of art through a hands-on project that engages their creativity and critical thinking. This project utilizes individual circular paper plates as canvases, where each plate represents a unique exploration of various artistic elements. Guided by the “Studio Habits of Mind” pedagogical approach,…
MMI Art Expanded Classroom 