Mr Pickup's Gang

During Art Week 2020, a merry band of eight Year 4 and Year 5 pupils looked at the Apples and Oranges by Paul Cezanne deciding to focus the fruit element but take their artwork in a more modern direction.

First of all we looked at the sliced fruit artwork of the American Hyperrealist artist Dennis Wojtkiewicz. He paints large luminous oil paintings of simple but complex objects such as slices of fruit or flowers. We loved the way in which he used colours.

Using the sliced fruit imagery, Mr Pickup introduced us to some of the artwork of John Squire, the guitarist and artist from The Stone Roses. His album cover for the bands first album used sliced lemons on a Jackson Pollock inspired canvas.

We decided to make our own painting based on John Squire's Bye Bye Badman using the colours of the school as a focus for our Jackson Pollock style backgrounds and the fruit art of Dennis Wojtkiewicz to be placed on top.

We started by using enamel spray paint to form the base of our artwork, choosing to use slate grey, cherry red or glacier white.

We then studied some of the techniques used by Jackson Pollock. We used a wooden dowel as our painting tool making use of long fluid movements, backhand flicks, side/wave flicking and writing in the air to produce our very own Newburn Manor Jackson Pollock inspired paintings.

After admiring our large scale work we focused on our drawing skills when slicing open lemons, limes and peppers. Having chosen our best sketches we transferred them on to card and then applied our colour mixing skills to make vibrant colours for our sliced fruit. 

Finally we named our artwork which now hangs proudly in the corridor and in Group Room 1.