Visual Arts

At Berkwood Hedge School the visual arts are integrated into the curriculum at every grade level. Our goal is to instill in every student a love and appreciation of visual art—allowing children the time and space to explore their own artistic expression and unique visual vocabulary. 

Students explore a variety of media and artistic styles including drawing, printmaking, painting, oil pastels, watercolor, book-making, and ceramics, learning new techniques and coming up with self-directed imagery. An unstructured Open Art studio is available to all students weekly during lunchtime, and the school has a kiln, which allows students to work with clay regularly. As individuals with their own artistic practice, our Art Specialists share their passion for art with students.

At the lower school, joy in creating is our main goal. Children are encouraged to explore and experiment with new media in a variety of applications. Essential art concepts are incorporated into projects to give students a foundation of visual arts literacy to carry with them as they develop.

In the middle school art curriculum, students learn to appreciate and recognize various artistic styles. Projects can be inspired by historic and contemporary artists or based in fine art technique. The focus of the middle school art program, beyond media exploration and technique building, is to embrace expression, build confidence, and practice creative problem solving. 

We culminate the year with lower school and middle school Art Shows, which are an opportunity for our student artists to showcase and share their creations with the entire Berkwood Hedge community.

Project Highlight: K - 4th Grade Painting Study

For a lower school painting project, students studied a portrait by Hung Liu, a local Bay Area artist born in China. Her drippy paintings are layered with lots of imagery to evoke memory. Students could focus on some parts and not the whole if they wished. Students explored methods to add the drippy lines using watered down paints and gravity to coax drips where we wanted them. The resulting portraits were displayed in a single large grid, each one a unique contribution to a beautiful collective effort.

Project Highlight: 8th Grade Paper Mache Sculpture

Eighth graders looked to their own cultural, community and/or regional identities and chose two foods to blend in a unique way, and recreated them in a large paper mache food sculpture. Students showed resilience and persistence as they built (and sometimes rebuilt) their armatures, learning how to strengthen connections and adjust their vision as they worked. They applied multiple layers of paper mache and used photo references to paint their sculptures, carefully color mixing and matching for truly incredible end results.