What was the title of the exhibition/show?
Haworth Art Gallery - Open Art Exhibition

Why did you choose to attend this exhibition/show?
We saw it advertised with our home education group on the internet. Our friends mum rang up to see if it would be suitable for us. It had art from good amateur artists as part of a competition. We thought it would be good to see how good the amateur artists

What did you see?
It was a collection of paintings by amateur artists. Some were good and some were not as good. These were collected in 2 rooms and labelled. We also saw sculptures.

Who were the artists and what do they create?
There were a lot of different artists, including one by Catherine Lansdale - the lady who taught our workshop. The manager of the gallery told us they had all entered a competition - up 3 entries and an art panel had chosen the ones to display. The winner would be decided by other art people and their prize would be to have their work only displayed in the two rooms.

What were your first impressions?
I thought it was going to not have many pictures and more of things that they sold by artists but it wasn’t. The building looked a bit weird and old. It was big and when you first walked in it was dark. Walking round, I felt inspired and creative. I was amazed and wowed - it made me feel that working harder is the way to get better. Also what you do should be what you love.

I really liked Craig Jones work
It is amazing and so creative it looks like it’s still wet!

I also liked Bernadette Flatman
I liked how realistic it was. If you had the real thing next to it it would be hard to see the difference.

What did you learn? Did it make you think about any art form differently?
I learnt that artist’s use lots of different techniques and different things to get an effect like some of them used wax to cover their paintings to give it a shine. I did not know about backwashing but I tried this while I was there on a snoopy picture I drew.
I learned you can make art out of any object really. Random objects made really good art, faces made from wires and stuff like that.

On Bernadette Flatmans picture she made the water look mirrored but blended paint at the same time which I thought was really clever and something I could work to achieve.

I was inspired by Barbara E Milnes - “A walk by the canal”. It had lots of colours and I want to try it for myself.

It was fun that we got to talk to an actual artist who worked at the museum every day: Steve Crowther. We even bought some of his work. I tried his technique on a background when I got home. He had drawn a rabbit with a watercolour merged background with paint splatters in it for effect. I did this with the Snoopy painting (pictured in the above section) when we got home and used it as a base for the teaching part of my Bronze award.

Did you enjoy the experience overall? Why?
The artist’s were very good at what they did and it made me realise how many different forms of art there are out there.

I liked meeting Steve Crowther and got to ask him questions about his work.  He knew a lot about merging paint.