Year 4 Portraits - St Peter’s Woodlands Grammar School

Kaylene Whiskey (b.1976) is a Yankunytjatjara artist who spends her days painting and working at Iwantja Arts – an Aboriginal-owned art centre situated at Indulkana on the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands roughly 1200km northwest of Adelaide. Whiskey’s brightly coloured comic-strip style paintings are known for their playful synthesis of popular and desert culture, often featuring recurring cameos of Hollywood actors, famous film and television characters, divas and pop icons interacting with Whiskey’s daily life in Indulkana.

Year 4 students analysed  Whiskey's, Seven Sistas Sign and identified features of the work that created a 'party mood' and attempted to use the clues in the artwork to interpret the themes using visible thinking routines. We focussed on how mood is portrayed and how the figures in Whiskey's work have been represented as a celebration of bravery and power. 

The students responded to music, experimenting with different techniques and materials while thinking about how colour, line, shape and pattern can portray mood. Following this, students selected media to create a relaxed background and drew a realistic self portrait focussing on proportion and facial details. Students then thought about a moment that they felt brave and powerful and drew a second self-portrait. Students chose materials and techniques and represented this feeling in any way that inspired them. Some of the ways students included silhouettes, manga, animals and characters from popular culture. - Jessica Hancock, Visual Arts Teacher