The day started with Sarah introducing the children to Mussorgsky and to Viktor Hartmann, whose figurative watercolour paintings provided the inspiration for Pictures at an Exhibition. Sarah showed the children her own beautiful artwork that she had been inspired to create when listening to the music, and the children listened to the piece and matched the pictures to the different elements of Sarah’s painting. Following this, we had a quick fire ‘game’ where we listened to short snippets of each piece and the children wrote down whatever words popped into their heads when listening to the music – happy, dark, fast, bouncy, to name a few – and sketched out a quick picture of what they thought the music might have been inspired by. It was fantastic to see the children listening to each other’s ideas about what the music meant to them, and how they were each inspired by what they were listening to. Later in the day, the children chose their favourite sketch and created a full-size picture using paints, pencils and watercolours to put in our very own ‘exhibition’.

They also started to create some abstract artwork inspired by the music they were listening to, and Sarah was brilliant at guiding the students in their creativity. The final activity of the day was to ‘promenade’ around the room to see each other’s artwork, as if they were walking around their very own art gallery. Their finished paintings have been framed and will be displayed at the concert at SJUN on Saturday 23^rd November – the children have all been invited along to see their artwork brought to life by LMP’s performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition!