Three senior boys from the same form are benefiting from a Royal Academy of Arts programme focusing on future careers.
Nabil Haque, Tochi Onuora and Scott Tan, of Year 13, are among only 50 A-level Art students who were selected from state schools across London to take part in attRAct, which stands for art through the Royal Academy careers and creative training.
QE has a long record of boys winning places on the programme, which include workshops, exhibition tours, studio visits, mentoring and careers & portfolio advice.
Head of Art Stephen Buckeridge said: “Participating in the scheme has been particularly helpful to all three students, especially as they have all applied to study Architecture at university – at Cambridge, The Bartlett (UCL’s faculty of the built environment) and at Harvard in the USA. The programme has offered an opportunity to take part in city sketching and in portfolio tutorial sessions with architectural students, as well as to receive mentoring from practicing architects.”
“They have all enjoyed unique experiences which have provided inspiration and context for course work and afforded them opportunities that are not available at School.”
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Tochi Onuora summarised the benefits of attRAct for him: “The skills developed, coupled with the opportunity to form connections with other art students from both school and university, have made this an invaluable experience.” He added that he felt the programme underlined the importance of Art being made available to young people.
Shown here are two of Nabil’s recent paintings, The Watchtower and The Crane. They derive from his personal interest in great dystopian architectural structures and are influenced by Soviet architecture and by The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, an early 19th-century painting by the German Romantic artist, Caspar David Friedrich.
“The Crane is powerful in every sense,” said Nabil. “It looms over the landscape I have created in order to make the viewer feel smaller and insignificant.”