Cranleigh Decorative
& Fine Arts Society

Young Arts 2012

Young Arts had a great year in 2012.  Our aim, as always, was to get young people involved in high quality artistic activities.  Here we want to tell you about the success we had.

Over several years we’ve been developing a relationship with St. Joseph’s Specialist School and College and autumn saw the completion of the life-sized welcome statue we helped to sponsor there.  We didn’t just give funding, though.  We also got sticky while adding some of the tesserae ourselves!  The finished statue is truly striking - no wonder it helped towards the school’s gaining a coveted Gold ArtsMark Award.

Guildford M.P., Anne Milton, joined the school’s learners, its Head of Art, Janet Stanley, and Pat Morgan of the Young Arts Team to celebrate the achievement.

For the first time in 2012, we’re pleased to have forged links with Wey House School.  Here, too, we provided funding - and practical help as well - for another exciting activity.  The boys wielded hammers and chisels with great enthusiasm in a series of wood sculpting sessions.  The result was some sinuous snake-like benches and giant toadstools that now form an imaginative play area in the school’s grounds.  The fun the boys have in it is proof positive the project gets their seal of approval.

Yet the triumph of Young Arts year was, we feel, the magnificent 2.5 metre high ceramic mural created by 29 local teenagers and fully funded by Cranleigh DFAS.  This was produced in a series of workshops organized in collaboration with the Arts Centre.  Under the guidance of its resident ceramicist, Penny Green, each youngster carefully fashioned a tile, using photographs of Cranleigh buildings as inspiration.

During the sessions, it quickly became clear that, once assembled, the tiles would create a very large and stunning mural.  So the hunt was on to find a space big enough to display it.  What luck, then, that the doctors enthusiastically offered it a permanent home in the brand new medical centre being built right in the heart of Cranleigh.  What better advertisement for the work of Young Arts could there be than that?  Not to mention the joy the teenagers had in creating a piece of local history!

We’re pleased and proud of what we helped the youngsters to achieve in 2012, but we don’t intend resting on our laurels. We’ve already got exciting things planned for 2013.

The Young Arts Team:

Pat Morgan and Jan Fricker
Coordinators

Wendy Brownlee, Sue Pescodd and Maureen Hellyer
Volunteer Helpers