Gemma Persello Kennish Yr 10

I thought the art trip to Emirates Palace to see Khaldoun's paintings and
taking part in a workshop was interesting and eye-opening.

Looking at his work at first, I could not make out much from it and could
only react to the colours and shapes my own way, but when he told us the
story of three of his pieces, I felt much more connected with them and him. I was able to completely understand where he had come from as he was painting
them. For example, I really took to the painting of the woman's face, with
only one eye, after he explained the story behind it. I thought his
explanation of why he had painted it this way, that from his point of view,
the woman had decided to become blind to what was happening around her. This made
its' impact on me much greater.

After looking at the exhibition we made our way outside to sit on the grass and paint the pieces of cardboard we had been given a few days earlier. At Khaldoun's request, we only used black paint, which proved to be a bit difficult at first but turned out to be not an
entirely bad thing as there was no hard decisions to make regarding a colour scheme.

I enjoyed this part of the day because you didn't have to get anything perfect or copy another image, you could just make marks on the cardboard anyway you wanted. When we had all finished with the black paint, Khaldoun used red paint on all of our pieces.

I thought this turned out quite well and made all of our paintings look not as boring or
limited in colour.

Overall, I enjoyed the day and even though Khaldoun was a bit eccentric he had some nice ideas and was really enthusiastic about our work.

Thank you for organising this trip for us, Ms Mochrie.

From Gemma.