• Different types of relationships

• How relationships may affect health and wellbeing, including mental health

• Healthy minds, including emotional wellbeing, resilience, mental health

• Use relevant strategies to build their vocabulary

• Articulate and justify answers, arguments, and opinions

• Give well-structured descriptions, explanations, and narratives for different purposes, including for expressing feelings

• Participate in discussions, presentations, performances, role play, improvisations and debates

• Consider and evaluate different viewpoints

Look together

• How do you think this person is feeling?

• Apart from their expression, what else helps create the emotion in this image?

• When might you feel like this?

Feeling Cross

Thomas Banks made this chalk drawing in the late 18th century. It conveys forceful emotions! The dark colours and strong lighting accentuates the feelings of sternness and resolution in the sitter’s face. While this image was initially made as a portrait, it would’ve been a useful model for the artist to use again when depicting a character in anger.

Look together

• How do you think this person is feeling?

• What’s she doing with her face to express that feeling? Can you mimic her expression?

• Is it a pleasant emotion?

Feeling Thoughtful

This small oil painting on board shows a contemplative young girl lost in her own thoughts. The tilt of her head and her downward gaze away from the viewer, make her look calm and serene. The use of muted colours and lack of background adds to this sense of quiet introspection. The artist painted many portraits of children whom she encountered on her extensive travels to Jamaica, Asia and Africa.

Make it your own

Using a globe, trace the journey from Jamaica to London. As a class, discuss how you would feel if you were to arrive in London from a distant location for the first time.

Look together

• How do you think this person is feeling?

• What are three things you notice in this image?

• If the face was removed from the painting, would it still feel happy? Why?

Feeling Happy

This painting by Young Artists’ Summer Show artist Bella, is of her mum. Bella writes: ‘I’ve never painted a portrait of someone else before but I wanted to be brave and paint something new.’ While the face is very simply described using bold and exaggerated shapes, it’s instantly recognisable as a portrait. The bright red smiling mouth and the use of joyful colours and shapes in the background help express happiness.

Look together

• Imagine your eyes are ears—what can you hear in this painting?

• Can you describe the relationship between the people in the image?

• Why do you think the artist selected this particular moment as a subject?

Parent and Child

YASS artist Annabel made this painting using a photograph from the artist’s family album. describes this image as ‘A painting of me as a baby with my dad’.

This image captures an intimate and playful moment that expressed the bond between parents and children. The father’s loving gaze and supporting gesture of lifting the child up, emphasises the parent’s role as a carer and protector.

Look together

• What emotions are these two figures feeling?

• Do you ever feel this way towards others?

• Do you think the artist has changed their appearance? If so, why?

Rivals

These two pen and ink figures belong to an album of caricatures by the artists William Daniell and George Dance.

Made to entertain the artists, their family, and their friends, Daniell and Dance exaggerate the figures’ emotions.

Depicting the faces in profile allows for greater distortions and comic appearance.

Because they’re facing one another, they seem to interact in an atmosphere of rivalry and mistrust.

This image challenges the viewer to decide on their relationship to one another.

Make it your own

In groups of four, choose two students to role play a disagreement using as many emotions as they can, and two students to sketch them. Once finished, place the sketches alongside one another and enjoy the comical effect!

Look together

• How well do you think these girls know each other?

• How do their gestures and faces describe their relationship?

• Who in your life might you hold in this way?

Siblings

This is an image by the printmaker Sir Francis Haden of his twin daughters Sarah and Jane.

With their arms around each other’s shoulders, their physical proximity describes their emotional closeness.

Clearly captured in a moment of happiness and contentment, both girls are smiling and looking ahead.

Look together

• Can you name all the colours and shapes in this painting?

• How does this painting make you feel?

• Imagine this image in black and white, would it feel different?

Feeling Bright

This large-scale painting by Vanessa Jackson is abstract, colourful and dynamic. This painting doesn’t represent anything in particular, but it does use colours and shapes to express emotions.

While paintings are static, the repetition of narrow rectangles and their placement at an angle creates a sense of movement and rhythm.

To paint Look on the Bright Side, the artist started with the sap green colour of the background, which reminded her of autumn in America, and then chose the orange-red to counter it, then the blue to react against that. She says ‘colour’s never static: colour’s always moving. So the forms are moving’.

Look together

• Can you find and count all the circles in this painting?

• How does this painting make you feel?

• Thinking about the past week, which day does this image illustrate for you?

Today’s Feelings

This painting was made by YASS artist Leela who writes:

‘Wednesday is a large mixed media canvas showing how I was feeling on the Wednesday that it was created. It depicts my mood and the emotions that I wanted to share. As a young autistic artist, my main reason for making art is to try to invite people into my visual world and to make sense of my own emotional life.’

Along with selecting specific shapes and colours to make her painting, Leela has also used expressive marks.

Make it your own

Decide as a class on a colourful medium to express your emotions, producing individual work on A4 paper. Complete an ‘emotion timetable’ by representing the days of the week in a chronological visual display.

Look together

• If this image was a sound what would it be?

• Is this painting calm or threatening?

• Imagine yourself in this painting, what kind of world would it be and what would you do in it?

Angular Feelings

The Cuban artist Carmen Herrera’s work is celebrated for its striking simplicity.

She selects limited colours and shapes and uses symmetry and asymmetry to create a variety of different movements and rhythms.

Her compositions often include just one or two bright colours which are painted very precisely so that the shapes look smooth and have crisp edges.

The results are pure, colourful and geometric abstractions which allow the viewer to consider their feelings and react emotionally to the compositions.