In this week’s Academic Scholars session, we listened to two interesting talks from our Sixth Form Scholars, Ash K and Charlotte P.

Charlotte’s presentation was on her EPQ:  ‘Painting St Peter’s Basilica: Bridging Art and Architecture’. She picked this topic when travelling as she hopes to pursue a career in architecture. Her aims were to explore whether architecture can be experienced through the medium of the painting and explained how she had to do a lot of research and found the work of Caitlyn Finlayson, Lesley Brook, and Van Gogh were especially helpful.

She showed us progress pictures of her painting she made for her EPQ and we were all in awe at the intricate detail and colours used to accentuate the lighting and sculptural aspects of the ceiling of St Peter’s.

Click to view Charlotte’s presentation.

She concluded in her EPQ that you can experience a building through the medium of the painting and described all of the skills she had learnt from doing her EPQ such as being able to identify reliable and unreliable sources and how she improved her time management skills.

There was time for questions, where she highlighted the most difficult part of her EPQ, which was how time consuming the painting was because of the extensive detail and size,(it was A1!).

She also explained how she painted the golden aspects which were done by mixing colours and using deep reds for the shadows.

Ash’s presentation was on beliefs in media and how your political, religious and personal beliefs can influence your life and the media you create. They focused on three children's books: Chronicles of Narnia (by C.S Lewis), His Dark Materials (by Philip Pullman) and Tales From Moomin Valley (by Tove Jansson). They explained how the three authors grew up with very different childhoods, and how this affected the metaphorical meanings of the books.

Philip Pullman grew up in a religious household but had a strong distaste towards organised religion and His Dark Materials’ main antagonist is the church which is based on Catholicism.

C.S Lewis rebelled against religion during his teenage years but then converted back to Christianity later in life, in the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan is a metaphor for God and the book is a story of people finding faith, forgiveness and redemption.

Trove Jansson was an openly queer author who was deeply anti-fascist and lived during World War 2 so in her books the Moomins’ house represented a safe and welcoming space where everyone was ultimately kind with subtle queer character representation.

They highlighted that the issues with your beliefs seeping into the media you create is that these books are technically propaganda aimed at children which villanise a group of people. However, these books can create a safe space for those with religious trauma or religious belief and show a variety of views which can let children understand and people’s different opinions.