Halsford Park Primary in West Sussex recreate John Dyer painting

“It is imperative that we protect time for the Arts and create opportunities for children to experiment and use their imagination.”

These are the words of Sue Turk, the head teacher at Halsford Park Primary at the time of the project, and we couldn’t agree more.

It is through imagination, art, play and creativity that mankind has developed all of the wonderful technologies, ideas and breakthroughs that drive our society and that will eventually save it when we become an multiplanetary species.

This might all sound a bit of a stretch connecting a school art project to a colony on Mars, but if we allow creativity to be removed from our education system and don’t support the new generation of creative and scientific dreamers and risk takers like Elon Musk, then eventually we will die off along with the planet.

Art is one of the many routes to fuelling the success and health of our species and an essential part too.

Miche Tetley from the Halsford Park school PTA originally made contact with us to propose the project to John Dyer. The school wanted to run a whole school project called ‘By the seaside’ focusing on the art of John Dyer and in particular his painting of Holywell Bay ‘Sea Holly and Skylarks’.

“We are looking into choosing a seaside themed work of art, and splitting the image into small squares and asking different children to reproduce a square each. We will then put all of the images together to form a full collaborative picture of the image, and find somewhere in school for it to be installed and displayed.”

'Sea Holly and Sky Larks', really conjures up the feeling of a day on the beach, which we think the kids will really relate to.”

The school requested an image file so they could reproduce the image at a larger size ready to be cut up into the sections for the children to work with.

“The project was really well run and I was delighted to support it. The school asked me if I could record a 'hello from Cornwall' message for their school assembly to introduce myself and my work. I was delighted to do this for them.” John Dyer

“Several teachers commented that the video by John Dyer was hugely inspiring to them and several parents have been inspired to get more creative as a result of taking part in the project.”

“It has been so satisfying to see how much life and inspiration the project has sparked.”

The school also took the opportunity to base a lesson around letter writing to thank the artist and sent many of the letters out to us.

“You encouraged us that art makes our skills develop.”

“You told us that maths and art can be the best of friends with shapes, measurements and size. Thank you.”

“The PTA raised a lot of money with the art project, consequently they can buy more equipment for the playground.”

The final piece of art created by the children will be officially unveiled on October 1st 2017 at the PTA AGM.