St John’s Primary School in Gosport, Hampshire recently embarked upon an Arts Week on June 25th 2007. 

Anna Dawes from the school commented on the exciting week:

“We have decided to use the National Gallery Model of “Take One Picture”, but instead of using their picture, we have chosen to use John Dyer’s ‘Boats and Ropes, St Ives’.

This is for several reasons, not least the fact that we have fallen in love with John’s seagulls!. The picture is very relevant to our children, as we also are a seaside community, albeit of a very different nature. Our backdrop is a commercial and military harbour, with several large marinas, and numerous sailing clubs. There is a good fish market on the other side of the harbour, but this is a long way outside many of our children’s experience. They are used to seeing huge warships and cross-channel ferries, plus large numbers of pleasure craft as constant traffic in the harbour and Solent, but have no experience of the sort of sea-going community which John’s paintings portray.

We are anxious that our children are exposed to different ways of life and cultures within their own country as well as overseas, and we are hoping that our Arts Week will help to address that.

We have a wide range of activities planned:

•Continuing the picture to left or right

•Reproducing seagulls in John Dyer’s style

•Learning about the history of sea fishing

•Writing from the perspective of a seagull

•Looking at communities such as Mousehole, Newlyn and Porthleven

•Finding out about the RNLI

•Making Cornish pasties

•Eating cream teas

•Learning sea shanties – the list goes on….