Art drawing workshop with Jeanette Barnes

This week, the Art Department welcomed the renowned artist Jeanette Barnes for an intensive full-day workshop with our Upper Fourth pupils. Known for her monumental, energetic depictions of urban evolution and construction, Barnes brought a sense of creative play to the studio, challenging our pupils to see the built environment as a living, breathing entity rather than a static backdrop.

Jeanette Barnes specialises in charcoal drawing and large-scale monoprints that capture the relentless energy of cityscapes. Her work frequently focuses on major London developments and iconic sites like Battersea Power Station or the ArcelorMittal Orbit. Her talk centred on this fascination with “urban vibration”, the idea that a city is never truly still, but in a constant state of flux between demolition and creation.

The morning began with a theoretical grounding where Barnes illustrated how gestural mark-making can translate the noise of a city into a physical presence on paper. The day was structured around a series of rapid, timed tasks designed to break traditional habits and encourage instinctive responses. Transitioning immediately to the studio, the pupils began with foundational exercises sketching conventional spaces to establish the underlying “bones” of a scene. Pupils were then challenged to turn their work upside down to focus on pure form rather than literal representation. As the focus shifted between foreground and background, students learned to pick up the “atmosphere” of a scene, anchoring their compositions before venturing into more expressive territory.

As the day progressed, Barnes pushed the group toward more demanding technical tasks, moving away from the safety of the pencil and into more tactile media. The studio became a hive of activity as the focus shifted to charcoal and mixed media, mirroring Barnes’ own preferred materials for large-scale work. This phase allowed the pupils to explore high-contrast tonal ranges and experiment with “reductive drawing,” using erasers to carve light out of dark, smudged backgrounds. Under her guidance, they learned to synthesise multiple viewpoints into single, cohesive compositions that captured the raw, visceral energy of the city.