Art Trip- Emirates Palace by Frances Nolan Yr12

On Thursday 11th January 2007, students from year10-13 were invited to a work shop hosted by an artist named Khaldoun. We first were introduced to Khaldoun who then showed us a video of his work, life and environment. I thought that this was interesting to see where he drew his inspiration from; in this case his home town Jordan.

We then were given a talk by another female artist, who told us about her work and the project she was given, to create 50 different paintings, representing different emotions. I was particularly interested in her work and thought that it was valuable talking to her because she explained to always put in a background and then the detail and to always stop when you think your work is finished (so you don’t overwork the painting.) Additionally, another thing which I learnt from this exhibition is to pick a theme, for example houses and then go into greater detail, becoming more and more abstract, for example the close up of the windows on the house.

Another aspect of the art trip I enjoyed was painting with your hands. I felt more at ease and was able to be freer with what I was doing, compared to having to be extremely careful with detailed paintings. Another thing which I observed from the art exhibition was that a lot of the Jordanian artists seemed to be heavily influenced by Picasso’s style of work. However, although the trip was useful in some aspects, I did not feel that it was worth 100dhs because I felt we could have spent longer experimenting with painting and doing more practical work, as opposed to looking around the exhibition and taking photographs, which we could’ve just done in our spare time.