Art Examples A2

War: A Personal Connection (A Level Art)

This A2 Art and Design Coursework project (Unit 3) was completed by Ruth Beeley while studying A Level Art (Edexcel) at St George’s School, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England in 2011. She was awarded 100% for this component.

A Level Art Unit 3: This sketchbook page is the result of a visit to the National Gallery, during which Ruth documented War art from a range of time periods. Competent, controlled areas of painting trail away into gestural background layers, over which critical analysis is written.

Ruth’s work is particularly notable for the way she approaches a challenging topic – one which most high school Art students have little first-hand experience of: War. Her emotion-filled sketchbook pages and skilful final works investigate different aspects of this theme (combat, injury, loss, grievance, war games and media propaganda) finding connections with her own life, such as displaced emotions, ostracised feelings and concepts of ‘the Other’ (as explored while studying Othello in her A Level English class).

We were lucky enough to interview Ruth about her project. Her responses are below:

Students can sometimes be unsure how to work from first-hand sources when a topic doesn’t have an immediately obvious practical connection to their life. Your project is an excellent example of how to approach this. Please describe the first-hand sources you found or created while exploring your War theme.

Ruth: It was difficult obtaining first hand resources for this topic, so I partly found and adapted images from war books; for example I colourised the iconic photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral and used a dip pen to replicate an image of a line of soldiers. I referred to the work of James Nachtwey who, unlike myself, has travelled to countries at war in order to document and present to us the realities of it. When it came to creating my own pieces I obtained a WW1 helmet and clothes that looked similar to an army uniform. I...