Budding artists, 1940
Hard at work in the art room at the end of the Green Verandah, 1940
Additions to the school buildings were constructed in 1932. These included a new art room, a science room, music rooms, a shoe room and a day pupils’ dining room. The buildings were very cold on winter mornings, with a few single bar radiators to warm the classrooms.
Mother Andrew Bell was artistic, gentle and humorous. She used her art room as a setting for quality and taste, filling the room with fresh flowers and studying their form and shape through her small black-rimmed glasses. Fay recalled picking daffodils and scented flowers from her father’s garden in Emerald to decorate Mother Andrew’s art room.
According to one student, Ann Galbally, who later became a professor of fine arts at the University of Melbourne, Mother Andrew taught the techniques of pastel working, watercolour and oil painting, but her preference was for clear, accurate draughtsmanship in Indian ink. She even managed to instil a love of map-making in the same media during her geography lessons. One of her students, Patricia Ziebarth, became Mother Mark and later an art teacher at Loreto Toorak when the study of art embraced a wider range of media and included art appreciation. For Fay, art appreciation was nurtured through the Art Club, held every Friday morning by Mother Francis Frewin in St Cecilia’s Hall under the chapel. Mother Francis gave talks on architecture and the history of art and illustrated her examples with photos, drawings and postcards, imparting in her students a great love of Europe and its treasures.