Doddl’Orangerie Mural at Gt. Doddington Primary
April 25
The Challenge:
A brand new building. Unblemished white walls. A long inviting corridor. The stage was set.
On my previous visit to Great Doddington Primary I painted the four walls of the library with storybook characters, ‘Wild Wood’, and through the windows I saw a new building gradually rising and taking shape to replace the ‘temporary’ and very tired mobile classrooms which had been in use for at least 40 years. EHT Josie Garnham (Executive Head Teacher) invited me to return to paint a corridor in the new space when construction was complete.
I had seen the architect’s plans and before leaving visited the building site interior to gain an idea of the scale of the challenge that lay ahead. However when I returned for a design meeting at the beginning of February to discuss the project, and saw the corridor in its finished state for the first time, somehow it looked much wider, taller and longer than the grey breeze block walls and concrete floor image I had stored in my memory bank.
A start date for the project was put in the diary and it had a good feeling about it, 23rd April, JMW Turner’s 250th birthday, which I read as being a good omen.
Back in November 2014, I’d worked with Josie on a Claude Monet inspired project at Warmington Primary, a mural with Remembrance as its theme. All the children of both Warmington and Titchmarsh Primary schools had participated in its creation and the end result was very successful. Josie was keen to repeat this experience at Gt. Doddington, and as the long and curved white walls of the new corridor bore a similarity to the rooms of the Musée de L’Orangerie in Paris, (see ‘The Light Fantastic’ article by Waldemar Januszczak below), she felt that Monet should be the inspiration for the mural this time too.
On 3rd April I presented a whole school assembly to introduce the proposed mural, Monet and the birth of Impressionism, following which I led a painting workshop to staff. In the weeks leading up to the start of the painting itself school trips were arranged for children to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the National Gallery in London, to see work by Monet and other Impressionist painters first hand.
23.4.25 – End of Day 1 – Impersonation of Christo & Jeanne-Claude complete
The Outcome:
My plan for the corridor was to create a mural which would have the same scale and letterbox format as Monet’s Grandes Décorations in the Musée de L’Orangerie. It would not extend from floor to ceiling, but appear as an illusion of a framed monumental sized canvas painting, which would require masking off an area to protect the wall around it.
In my assembly presentation I described how the paintings of JMW Turner had been an important influence upon the work of Claude Monet, but that thanks to the invention of the tin paint tube, he and his fellow Impressionists were not tied to the studio and so could work en plein air. His painting technique therefore had to adapt to being outdoors too. He needed to work at speed to capture an impression of the flickering of light on leaves caused by wind in the trees, billowing smoke in railway stations, and the rippling, reflective, dancing surface of sea, river or a lily pond. Leonardo may have taken 16 years to paint to perfection Lisa del Giocondo’s portrait (the Mona Lisa), but Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise’, according to Andrew Graham-Dixon in his BBC Art of France documentary series, was painted in 46 minutes.
Monet was perhaps the first to produce ‘Series’ paintings, where he would change to another canvas as the light or the weather changed during the course of the day, so I felt the mural should respond to this philosophy too. Rather than creating an interpretation of one particular Monet image I decided the mural should be an amalgamation of 3 paintings which, as one walked along the corridor, would suggest a passage of time through the day. The left portion of the painting would suggest the light of early morning, gradually changing to the warm brightness of the high midday sun at the centre, with the right hand side suggesting the sombre low evening light at sunset.
The paintings I combined to generate this composition were ‘Le Bassin Aux Nymphéas, Reflets Verts’, 1920/26, from the Bührle Collection, Zürich, Switzerland, ‘Le Bassin Aux Nymphéas’ from the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland and the ‘Water Lilies’, 1919, from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
24.4.25 – End of Day 2 – Painting contributions by Wren & Starling Classes (Reception, Y1 & Y2)
A hostile critic once famously characterised Impressionism as, ‘the crude application of paint, the appearance of spontaneity, the conscious incoherence, the bold colours, the contempt for form’, which is a perfect description for the approach I proposed to the groups of children who each spent around 30 minutes painting on the wall. Armed with a sponge and a tub of paint they created a painterly texture with ‘Dibs & Dabs’, colours applied in a succession of layers as each new group arrived. The most apt term I’d use to describe the painting process would be “sheer enjoyment”. A yet to be edited ‘time-lapse’ movie of the whole event will bear proof to this without question.
25.4.25 – End of Day 3 – Painting contributions by Wagtail & Woodpecker Classes (Y3 & Y4)
Some participants arrived keen and enthusiastic, some were nervous and apprehensive, but all (including teaching and admin staff, as well as catering ladies and the occasional parent) departed with a distinct feeling of achievement, pleasure, belonging and inclusion. What began to appear on the wall was also a perfect introduction to ‘Action Painting’ which, using the words of art critic Harold Rosenburg, was “not a picture but an event”. The object of my instructions to each group, or modus operandi, was to generate a feeling of animation, a suggestion of light flickering on a surface that is never perfectly still. And even if that surface is acting as a mirror, a gentle breeze may still be moving the reflection.
28.4.25 – End of Day 4 – Painting contributions by Mallard & Red Kite Classes (Y5 & Y6)
On Thursday 24th April small groups of children from Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 painted on the wall, followed on Friday 25th by groups from Year 3 and Year 4. On Monday 28th it was the turn of children from Years 5 and 6 to make their mark.
End of Day 4 – painted texture detail created by 12 groups of children (& staff)
For the next 3 days I worked alone to bring the painting to a conclusion, add a trompe l’oeil ‘frame’ comparable to those that border the paintings in the Musée de L’Orangerie and to remove the protective coatings I’d laid over the wall and floor in the corridor on the 23rd.
29.4.25 – End of Day 5 – Working alone
The Nymphéas (Water Lilies) cycle, inspired by his water garden, were Monet’s last great project, begun when he was in his seventies and which occupied him till his death at the age of 86. They were painted in his garden in Giverny as well as in a large purpose built studio. As the frontline of the WW1 battlefields were only 11 miles from his home, the sounds of warfare could be heard as he worked.
The Water Lilies had developed from an earlier series of paintings of Weeping Willows, a majestic tree growing beside the lily pond in his Giverny garden. Painted toward the end of the First World War the tree has great significance, it is a symbol of sorrow, as a lamentation on the state of the world. French deaths in WW1 totalled over 1.4 million with 4 million wounded, a quarter of all French men born in the 1890’s had been wiped out.
30.4.25 – End of Day 6 – Working alone
These paintings were an expression of grief. Weeping Willows were seen as a symbol of death and mourning, a common sight in French cemeteries and often personified as a woman or used to symbolise female mourning.
The vertically structured Weeping Willow paintings were ultimately overtaken by the expansive horizontal format of his final monumental Nymphéas (Water Lily) series. In these he dispensed with the horizon completely to focus solely on the reflections of the sky, the surface of the water, the flowers and lily pads floating in a world seen upside down.
‘Water Lilies’ is a translation of the French word ‘Nymphéas’, which is related to Nymphes (Nymphs), female spirits who live in sacred places. The water lily is closely related to the lotus which the Egyptians identified as a symbol of birth and immortality, while in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy it represents the mind rising up from the mud and opening itself to wisdom and enlightenment.
A collection of these great paintings were eventually donated to the French State after the Great War in 1922 and have been permanently housed in the Musée l’Orangerie in Paris since 1927. They fill two large oval rooms, a collection which Monet hoped would offer beauty to wounded souls, calm nerves and offer the viewer ‘an asylum of peaceful meditation’. He felt his late paintings were an attempt at healing – his artistic response to the traumatic events of the war. They were intended as an invitation to sit in silent contemplation and observe the painted reflections in the water as one might the continual turn of waves on a seashore, or the flames of a living room fire.
1.5.25 – End of Day 7 – Working alone
Our Faux-Monet Grandes Décoration will be permanently housed in Great Doddington Primary for the foreseeable future. Following 3 days of painting by children, and 3 by me, the new Orangerie Wing was officially opened by Olympic athlete Anita Neil MBE OLY on 2nd May (2.5.25), celebrated by a special assembly with performances by children, with parents invited as special guests. It was a rewarding and perfect end to a very eventful week. In addition to the hive of frenzied activity taking place in the corridor the school had also received a visit from Ofsted!
On reflection, it was a ‘full-on’, exhaustive 7 days, a period of time which could easily conjure a phrase from the pen of both Shakespeare and Dickens. Although perhaps one of the busiest and tiring of weeks for everyone in the school, rather than suggesting ‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, the combination of a successful mural outcome and receiving a positive result from an Ofsted inspection might just swing it in Shakespeare’s favour.
As he so fittingly put it, ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’.
The Concept:
The Reality:
The Movie:
Great Doddington Primary School, Church Lane, Great Doddington, Wellingborough NN29 7TR
Waldemar Januszczak – The Light Fantastic 4.6.06
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