• Grade 8 Impressionism: Painting Light, Colour, and Atmosphere

    Grade 8 Impressionism: Painting Light, Colour, and Atmosphere

    In this Grade 8 painting project, students explored the poetic language of Impressionism through close observation of light, colour, and atmosphere. Inspired by key works from artists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, students investigated how painters of the late nineteenth century transformed everyday scenes into luminous studies of perception. Rather than focusing on…

  • IB Grade 11 Visual Arts at Rome’s Contemporary Galleries

    IB Grade 11 Visual Arts at Rome’s Contemporary Galleries

    Our Grade 11 IB Visual Arts students recently stepped beyond the classroom and into two of Rome’s most influential contemporary galleries for a day of focused inquiry and dialogue with the living art world. At Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, students experienced Giuseppe Ducrot’s striking solo exhibition, where sculpture and material craft operate in conversation with deep…

  • Weird Details: Medieval Marginalia Reimagined

    Weird Details: Medieval Marginalia Reimagined

    Medieval manuscripts are famous for their beauty, gold leaf, and devotional imagery. Yet hidden in the margins of these sacred pages lives another world entirely. Tiny hybrid creatures, mischievous animals, musical skeletons, and knights battling snails populate the edges of medieval art with strange humour and subversive imagination. As writer Olivia M. Swarthout observes in…

  • From Canvas to Stage: Recreating the Work of Baroque Masters

    After studying Baroque artists such as Caravaggio, Gentileschi and Velázquez, students examined how these painters used strong contrasts of light and shadow, expressive poses, and detailed composition to create powerful scenes. In small groups, students analyzed a chosen artwork, then recreated the painting using costumes, props, and staged lighting. In the studio, students planned each…

  • JOSEF ALBERS: LEARNING TO SEE THROUGH COLOR

    JOSEF ALBERS: LEARNING TO SEE THROUGH COLOR

    Grade 4 Elementary School Project, November 2025Color is a tricky companion. It shifts, deceives, glows, and hides, depending on what sits beside it. No one understood this better than Josef Albers, one of the great teachers of the twentieth century. Albers spent decades exploring how colors speak to one another, how one hue can appear…

  • From Leaf to Light: The Mosaic Drawing

    From Leaf to Light: The Mosaic Drawing

    This project began with a simple act: stepping outside. Students walked through the school grounds as autumn slipped toward winter, searching the ground for fallen leaves. They became observers of seasonal change, noticing how time reshapes the natural world. Some leaves were torn by wind, some freckled by decay, some filled with intricate networks of…

  • IB Visual Arts × MAXXI, 1+1: Relational Art

    IB Visual Arts × MAXXI, 1+1: Relational Art

    Our IB Visual Arts students spent the day inside the living architecture of MAXXI. From the moment they stepped inside, the space asked them to slow down and look differently. This was not a gallery of still objects. It was a set of encounters waiting to happen. Students gathered in clusters, pointing, comparing, mapping the…

  • When Myth Meets Manga

    When Myth Meets Manga

    The sixth graders spent the past few weeks travelling between two worlds, the mythic imagination of Ancient Egypt and the expressive intensity of Japanese manga. The project began with a simple thought experiment: what happens when you combine a god who has lived for thousands of years with a drawing style that lives in the…

  • Where Does the Art Live?

    Where Does the Art Live?

    Grade 9 History of Art | Light, Space, and Perception In this Grade 9 History of Art project, students stepped into the worlds of James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, artists who shape perception through light, space, and the quiet drama of seeing. Instead of beginning with monumental installations, the class began with something intimate: a…

  • Restoring Time: The Good Shepherd Reimagined

    Restoring Time: The Good Shepherd Reimagined

    In this Grade 7 Visual Arts project, students explored one of the most meaningful images in Early Christian Art: The Good Shepherd from the Catacombs of Priscilla. Beneath the streets of Rome, the original fresco shows a calm and caring figure surrounded by animals, painted on the walls of ancient burial chambers. Over hundreds of…