Connecting Art with Literature
Dear Richland community,
I'm delighted to introduce you to the thoughtful work and creative growth of one of our Grade 7 students this term. Through our Visual Arts class, Francial has explored the power of artistic analysis and expression, discovering how paintings communicate meaning and how his own visual art can amplify important messages. What started as learning to interpret the techniques and intentions of contemporary artists evolved into something more personal — a meaningful interdisciplinary journey where Francial combined his literacy skills with visual creativity to paint his own powerful response to a poem about social media's impact. As his teacher, I've watched him move from careful observation to confident creation, and I'm excited to share his reflections on this learning experience with you.
The paragraphs below are written by Francial :
Good day everyone,
I’m Francial and I am from the grade 7 class. When you think of school subjects do you think of Math, Science and Geography? Well there’s also ART and it’s just as important! After our first term, Performing Arts was finished and we started doing Visual Arts every Monday and Tuesday.
During our first weeks of Visual Arts it was all just typing up assignments every week. At first I felt not as engaged because we were focused on explaining and analyzing different paintings to see what techniques they used and the meaning behind them but it felt slow. Over time, I understood that this was an important step to painting our OWN painting. As we needed to understand how to express ourselves properly through techniques. For example, this year we had an interdisciplinary unit of Language and Literacy and Visual Arts which combined our poetry unit that talked about resiliency. Our painting task was to express our poems through paintings. My poem was about the negative effects of social media so I painted a dark stormy sea to show how harmful social media can be.
During this unit I understood why many artists choose not to not paint what is in front of them and instead express their own emotions and thoughts through images. They do this using colour, style and technique to give off feelings. This is also called contemporary/modern art. Personally I actually like this art movement/style because it gives you more freedom to paint whatever you want without having a wrong answer.
Something I will remember is how I can express my poem and ideas freely through my paintings. Not everyone needs to be really good at art to enjoy it. You could still make a fun piece to look at. After reading this blog I hoped you learned how cool it is to paint your own ideas even if you’re still developing as an artist.