I have never experienced such a rainy season in the seven years that I have been organizing camps in the gallery. It rained almost continuously from Monday to Wednesday. However, we were very lucky because around lunch time, when we had to move to the dining room, the regular rain stopped. Only on Wednesday it looked like we would get wet, but we had just planned to visit the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, so we waited out the heavy downpour in the dry. On Thursday, the weather cleared, so we could make our regular trip to Bransouze. This time was special because we had lunch in nature and yet on chairs brought to us together with the pizza by our willing colleagues Evžen and Jana.
Art activities were adapted to the theme of the camp. The children tried to create on paper or their own hands using tempera paint and sponges. They tried to three-dimensionally capture the sound and their own tastes. They decorated their bodies according to the pattern of the New Zealand Maori. They were also often inspired by works of art from the permanent exhibition. For example, the camp t-shirt was printed with its own combination of colors based on Zdeněk Sýkora's work entitled Red and Blue Structure. The children worked with paint and with the help of tissue paper, from which they created landscapes based on the subjects of paintings by Otakar Lebeda, Antonín Mánes or Josef Navrátil. They also experienced for themselves how the artists who decorated the ceilings of churches, monasteries and palaces probably worked. They lay down on the floor under the tables, stuck the papers to the bottom of the desk and created while lying down. They also created a small intervention in the public space near the gallery's ornamental apple tree, which we planted this year as part of Night with Andersen. In groups, the children decorated the wooden fence around the tree using colorful cotton balls.
During the final exhibition this year, the children also got their parents involved. They prepared refreshments in the shape of a mandala on the table. There was a surprise hidden under it. Parents had to consume various snacks in order to learn what is hidden under the mandala and can take it away as a souvenir. They made it!
Pavlína Pitrová, August 2023
