Faculty:

Carey Gates
M.F.A., Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
B.F.A., University of Pennsylvania

STUDIO ART

The art studio classes teach skills used to create two-dimensional and three-dimensional art, employing a variety of materials and techniques and focusing on repeated artistic practice and process. The language of art composition – color, value, line, form, shape, balance, rhythm, and movement – is explored and practiced through abstract and representational projects.  Students use various drawing and painting materials, collage, printmaking, clay, found objects, and wire. Some projects are designed to isolate the formal elements of composition, dealing with a non-objective language of color, line and shape to create interesting and successful compositions. Other projects, specific to problems of representation, focus solely on training the eye and hand to work together to re-present the subject in a specific medium. Most projects combine these two approaches with, of course, each student’s own creativity and imagination.

Rigorous instruction is always balanced with more playful projects. Collage, abstract painting and hand-building with clay are used to focus on different skills, while simultaneously allowing the students more freedom of expression, experimentation and artistic play. Projects using the specific style of an artist give the students different and exciting guidelines for creating their own work. The class is always open to the changing dynamic and ability of each individual and of the class as a whole.

ART HISTORY

Once they begin formal language study, students undertake a survey of art from prehistory to the present. Students are introduced to a variety of art images and practices, with a focus on how and why the art was made.  Moving through time from cave paintings and the ancient world to the advent of Christianity, the Renaissance, and Modernism, they learn that reasons and practices change but that the underlying themes of representation, formal elements, and ideas build on and react to tradition. All of this gives the students a foundation and a vocabulary for a subsequent and more detailed exploration of the study of art.

At this level, learning how to look at and talk about different kinds of art is the primary objective. The study of representational cave paintings, with its specific yet theoretical ideas, and of African and Native American art, filled with abstraction but supported by literal meaning, offers a solid introduction to representation and abstraction of nature.  It also exposes them to different ideas of beauty, decoration and the myriad functions of art.  Over time, students begin to make their own, educated assumptions and to gain insights into meaning and purpose when looking at images. They begin to see similarities and differences in art across time, allowing for exciting discoveries in the classroom. This experience teaches them how to look and, with their growing knowledge of the vocabulary of art, how to think and to speak about what they see.

For course offerings, click here.

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