Students in Sixth through Ninth Grade continue to build on and refine skills learned in the lower grades. Classes are conducted twice per week, each eighty minutes long, for six weeks. Assignments are designed to provide continued practice and reinforcement of intermediate concepts while introducing new materials, techniques and processes for the advanced student. The curriculum includes:
Students refine their drawing skills while using more sophisticated tools. They are expected to learn how to use professional drawing pencils in combination with tortillion stumps, a kneading eraser as a drawing tool on a half-toned charcoal paper, colored pencils, pastels, oil pastels, and how to enlarge and transfer an image using a grid.
Ninth Grade looks at Caravaggio portraits in chiaroscuro, and using a mirror, creates self-portraits by erasing (with a kneaded eraser) black charcoal from a covered white surface. Students learn to blend and soften with a tortillion stump and highlight with white charcoal pencil. Eighth Grade looks at Elizabeth Murray’s fragmented domestic drawings and draws an object in pastel, focusing on shading and blending to model the form. They transform the form to bring a personal narrative to the object and the composition. (This project can include paint.)
Students improve on blending, color theory and brush techniques. They learn to paint with acrylic paint (on canvas in the Ninth Grade). They practice using complementary colors for muting and making browns.
Eighth Grade studies the black and white photographs of Arthur Tress with his people as subjects and/or shadows. Students partner up, script a narrative using two shadows, trace two sets of their shadows in position of their roles (props can be used), cut one set and detail the characters. They collage them into a painted scene with the shadows in acrylic paint. Seventh Grade looks at the symbols of Keith Haring and designs a symbolic narrative using simplified forms, and paint in bold, flat, graphic style, in acrylic paint.
Students are introduced to more sophisticated methods of printmaking: monotype printing, linoleum printing, etching and silkscreen printing.
Sixth Grade looks at early Sixteenth Century etchers, and Callot and Rembrandt to see the results of an etching. Students learn two etching processes: drypoint and acid bite. They draw a design directly on the plate (drypoint) or prepare a copper or zinc plate with an acid resistant, waxy ground (acid bite) and redraw their design with an etching needle into the ground. The plate is dipped into a bath where the design is bitten into the plate. Students ink the plate and print in etching ink. This project includes an on-site workshop at a printing shop. Seventh and Eighth Grade creates a design on linoleum, cut away the negative space with linoleum tools, ink and print. This can be a multicolor process by printing at various stages of craving. Ninth Grade designs a stencil or multiple of stencils, and creates a pattern and/or narrative on large scale paper in spray paint.
Sixth through Eighth Grade are introduced to beginning darkroom techniques using a variety of materials: colored paper shapes, feathers, string, etc., and small found objects directly exposed onto photography paper (photogram) to create a print. Ninth graders learn how to make a pinhole camera and develop their first image.
Students refine their capabilities in three-dimension and challenge their problem solving skills in a variety of materials: wire, wood, clay, plaster, foam, papier-mache and cardboard. From Sixth through Ninth Grade, students learn how to throw a pot on the potter’s wheel.
Sixth Grade looks at Greek and Roman Gods and creates a mold from their face in plaster, which is transformed into animals or mythological creatures. Ninth Grade studies a reproduction of a human skull and builds an armature in newspaper, which is used to make a ceramic bust with consideration for proportion and character.
Learn about a variety of methods for manipulating fibers into a work of art: basic loom weaving, stitchery, batik, paper-making.
Sixth Grade looks at Chuck Close’s paper pulp portraits. Students have a self-portrait photograph in black and white with overlay grid acetate of one-inch squares. They draw their portrait on a larger paper with two-inch grids matching the smaller grid acetate. With Crayon dash watercolor pencils, they go over their pencil lines. At a paper making shop, students make paper. While wet, they transfer their drawings, and fill the shapes with colored paper pulp and a wide range of grays.
There is a major Upper School theatrical production each school year for which the art department designs and creates sets and scenery. The art department, the shop, and the drama and music teachers work closely with students to produce a full-stage production. Students learn how a set is built and how to enlarge from a small sketch into a large-scale backdrop, and to design and paint individual props (furniture and floating flats, etc.). Sets are built in foam core and wood and are painted in acrylic. Scenery workshops are held outside the classroom and off school days, which can include parental and faculty assistance.