Year 3 Painting and Sculpture - St Michael’s College

Year 3 students from St Michael’s College have been exploring the work of Australian-born painter and printmaker Dorrit Black, who completed her formal studies at the Adelaide School of Arts and Crafts around 1914. After further education in Europe so she could acquire, in her own words, an ‘understanding of the aims and methods of the modern movement’, she returned to Australia in 1929 as a passionate advocate for modern art and dedicated the rest of her life to teaching, promoting and practising modernism in Australia.

Some students have camped in Second Valley and have gone bushwalking in Gorges in South Australia - places depicted in Black's paintings. The students are also learning about rock formations and earth sciences such as geographical landscapes in their science lessons.

Using Black as a starting point, students created their own paintings in response local landscapes in Port Willunga using watercolour and black lines to emphasise the geometric shapes of the rock formations. Combined with AGSA's Art School in a Box students learnt about the visual conventions form, proportion, scale and colour as well as Cubism, Modernism and Landscape. Some students then went on to create 3D layers using Makers Empire to construct the landscapes that they made in two-dimensions.

- Kate Tyrwhitt, Art & Design Teacher, Innovation and Indigenous Education Coordinator-Primary