Art

The Subject

At Collingham we believe that drawing, painting , sculpture and printmaking are skills that are teachable to everyone. We aim not only to obtain excellent results but also to bring out the individual creativity of all our students.

 

Art at Collingham

 

The Collingham Art Department is a flourishing centre for the development of the visual arts. Students are encouraged to experiment and explore, deepening their understanding of, and response to, the visual world, enabling them to produce artwork that is both unique and technically accomplished. Our staff are committed, inspirational, demanding and fun: given appropriate guidance and sufficient individual attention, all students are capable of producing works of a very high calibre. We achieve a high success rate at both GCSE and Advanced Level. We also have a high success rate with entries to foundation and diploma courses at colleges such as Central St. Martins, Chelsea, Camberwell, Wimbledon, Brighton, City and Guilds and the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. The purpose-built Art Studio has facilities for drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking, and we also organise research trips to galleries, exhibitions, museums and places of special interest.

 

The course

We currently follow the Edexcel syllabus for GCE (Fine Art). Assessment for the two-year A level qualification is based on four units of practical work (i.e. projects chosen by the student under the direction of the tutors), including a critical study involving some writing, or audio recording, and pertinent research deriving from the students’ own work. Each week there is a two-hour life drawing class, and a one-hour slide show on art application. We require a programme of homework to be carried out, equal in time to the duration of lessons each week.
The course concludes with the end of year examinations at AS and/or A2 level. There is no
winter examination in this subject on any board, but retaking students may complete their project work in the autumn term and return for the exam in the summer. The art studio is accessible to students forty hours a week. As a cabalist once said, “In order to grasp the invisible, first you must look very carefully at the visible” – a quotation used by the painter Max Beckman.

 

Preferred Board: Edexcel