Chroma by The Brooklyn Waldorf School

Art and the visual image are part and parcel of Waldorf education. From a young age students are instructed through visual storytelling and experience across all fields of their schoolwork; mathematics, writing and grammar, foreign language, natural sciences and social studies. The children compose and illustrate their lessons through writing and drawing that culminate in a bound, seminal series every year. Maintenance of this work particularly in the upper grades is careful and exacting and often consists of adept recreation.

All the while the students’ are also forming a sense for flow, harmony and spontaneity through guided water colour painting. In the upper grades students are introduced to the veil method, wet on dry paper allowing them to return to a painting over a series of classes. The longer durée grants students the opportunity to return to their work and carry out more complicated images.

The work on show in the Chroma collection is by students ages 11-14, all centered around the theme of independence. On the one hand students were invited to depict landscapes, portraits or still lifes /object studies that conveyed their interpretation of the theme while they were also tasked with independence in initial concept. There is a freedom to the imagination of very young students that in the middle years can dissipate to the comfort of conformity in the awkward stages of early adolescence. It is imperative however that they are invited again and again to birth new ideas. In works such as Giorgia Fusina’s Solitary Tree and Jed Sierick’s Girl with Balloon, independence is boldly established by the stripped back subject in the work while the collections of portraiture by Lola, Manfred and Cielo illicit the self as a pensive subject at the brink of new things. Formally, the primary cohesion of the work is built up through the watercolours. Students worked from the same set of colour to resolve their work