Artist Carrie Stanley Visits CCCS

Posted on 19th May, 2017

As part of Arts Week, artist and art teacher Carrie Stanley spent the day at CCCS. In Assembly she encouraged the boys to think about how art can change the way we think about the world.

She described the time she spent in the Italian forest, wearing bells on her boots to scare the adders, and how the experience had opened her eyes to doing art outside as well as inside. Extolling the virtues of art, she said: “A lot of us feel guilty about playing and associate it with what you do out of school but, with art, there is lots of scope to play.”

Ms Stanley gave the boys her rules: that there is no such thing as wrong, that when things don’t turn out as you expect they can often be happy accidents, and that playfulness and getting messy are “so important”. She did an exercise with the boys, asking them to pick three random words and design a house based on them. The boys came up with a rocket house, a balloon house, a pickle house and a happy meal house. “You don’t have to be an artist to love art,” she said. “Art is just a way of looking at the world.”