Today I was lucky enough to have the opportunity of judging an art competition which featured the artwork of two groups of children; local schoolchildren from Reception and First Year classes from around the Fylde Coast. I was asked to judge the competition as a local, qualified artist and I was happy to help out.
The competition was sponsored by VIDA Education who are an educational recruitment service based in Poulton. They are an owner-managed business that was founded in 2011. Their directors have over thirty years of experience working in the education sector and have built the company on the simple ethos of: Listen, Consider, Respond. They have worked well within the local community and wanted to give something back to the local children, so came up with the idea of having a colouring competition and providing prizes.
This was my Foundation class 'shortlist' and from this I had to decide on a first, second and third place winners. It was (as you can see) really hard to choose. I based my decision on some of the values I had absorbed at Blackpool Art School. These were:
Planning
Originality
Composition
Imagination
Skill
Creativity
What criteria would you use to judge?
Here is the work of my 'shortlisted' First year students. I found these even harder to judge!
Some had been given the theme 'what do you like about the Fylde Coast?', I particularly liked the child who had created a scene depicting a day out on a rainy day! But I was also impressed by the ambitious pleasure beach scene and the skill in both the countryside image and the sunbathers on the beach. In fact every picture in both the first years and the early years shortlist were outstanding work in their own individual way!
So today I discovered that judging art competitions is hard, very hard! and of course I wanted to encourage every child, whether they were on the shortlist or not to keep up with their creativity, their self expression. I believe it is an inbuilt drive, and it keeps us happy and healthy when we express ourselves. It has been with us since the beginning of time, evident in the earliest artworks in the caves where we were making art and music as well as crafting tools, jewelry and clothes. Creativity is such a human thing and encourages us to connect with the world around us - as all these pictures show!
Which pictures would you choose and why? I bet we would all have different choices and reasons...
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