Sevenoaks School ’ s IB Art Course
Visual Arts with the IB at Sevenoaks School
Freshly started as a Visual Arts student in the early weeks of the course , Lower Sixth students often talk about feeling daunted by seeing the Upper Sixth attack enormous canvases or construct sophisticated sculpture , not realising that those very same students felt exactly the same a year previously . The course fosters a period of structured teaching of skills ; life classes , printmaking workshops , photography and ceramics all play a part . Often students find that some or all of these practices are not completely in sympathy with their natural strengths , however , this grounding provides fertile ground for the sowing of the seeds for creative problem solving .
These skills break into the open in the second term of the course , when an open-ended theme is offered to encourage independence and innovation . Students take time to find their way through investigation , experiment and research . The pace varies but invariably , students identify areas of personal interest for creative investigation . From this point , it is anybody ’ s guess where the work might go . Sometimes students just want to paint while others fuse traditional processes with digital approaches . What matters is the student voice and that an authentic body of work emerges that is agonised over , pushed and moulded by the creative visions of these young and exciting artists .
Charley Openshaw