Eight big beautiful abstract pieces celebrating creativity and brightening the walls of my local primary school.
Last year I enjoyed a week’s art residency at Arbury Primary School, and I’ve recently been back for a visit to see the art we created actually up on their walls.

The week began with me painting on stage in the school assembly. I painted in response to their favourite song ‘A right to be loved’ whilst the 450 pupils sang along and watched the picture evolve, projected onto the large screen.
As the morning progressed each class was invited onto the stage to take a closer look and add their own circle round the edge.

This painting is now pride of place on the back wall of their Expressive Arts Hall

Here is the time-lapse video of the performance art

I photographed their beautiful creations, so the school could purchase some large canvas prints to display around their building.
Here are the seven finished prints that I saw on my recent visit, now hanging in the corresponding year group areas, for the children to remember the fun we had.

To see more pictures and read more detail about my week as artist in residence at Arbury Primary School last year, here is the blog post about:

• the week itself
• and also a post about the idea behind my visit.
  

To make enquiries about booking me for your school, community group or event, please email me at
KateGreenARTand [email protected] and we can discuss a package that is tailor-made to suit your setting.

At Easter I spent a week as the artist in residence at the Christian conference Spring Harvest #SH2019, Minehead (wk 1) and thought I'd share with you what I got up to. The theme this year was Prayer UNLIMITED: Unlimited – Access, Unlimited – Connection, Unlimited – Potential; Unlimited – Hope.
There were three main parts to my role. 1. to provide all age activities for the morning programme called the BIG START. 2. to lead an art workshop for the guests one afternoon and 3. to paint live in the evening celebration. I also had the opportunity of selling my art and merchandise in the bookshop.

The morning sessions were based around the theme of a School of Prayer “No rules, no limits!” The creative team leading this programme had to dress in school uniform – hence the pigtails! I based my activities around the idea of a graffiti wall and each morning added a new word. I'd learnt from the previous year to keep things super simple as there would be a large number of kids, about 10 minutes to do things and it was too loud to give any explanations alongside the songs, games and drama also happening. We used chalks, did handprints, created collage and sketched.

Each evening, next to the stage, I got to paint HUGE pictures, during the worship, the talk and the ministry time. Working so big and with limited time lent itself nicely to expressive, messy work. I barely used a brush or palette, I just threw the paint on the canvas roll and manipulated it with a shower squeegee and sponges.
There was a camera over my shoulder a lot of the time with a live feed to the large screens either side of the venue, with images of me painting interspersed with footage of the 3000+ audience and the band. I was having so much fun that I was mostly able to block this out of my mind and just get on with what I was doing.
I used the theme of each day as inspiration for what I painted and invited the Holy Spirit to partner with me as I worked – I felt that, as well as the pieces having a prophetic nature in their concept, there was also moments of prophetic action/movement that I felt God prompting me to do. For example I was led to paint with a feather at a point where people were responding to God (he whispered to me that he was meeting them with a particular gentleness in that space, and the feather represented this).
One of the evenings I felt God tell me he wanted my painting as an interactive/responsive piece, so I dialogued with the preacher and host about how to incorporate this into the programme. People were invited to put a thumbprint on my picture to represent their sons and daughters who they were interceding for. It was so moving to see 100+ queuing to engage with God through my art.

Each evening I left my paintings to dry over night, then in the morning I hung them on the bleachers. The images are available for guests (and anyone else) to purchase as poster prints in my Etsy shop. Click each picture below for the links to read the explanations for each piece.

It was a full on, tiring week that I thoroughly enjoyed and was a huge privilege to be a part of!