Course Description
Explores the potential of drawing in a contemporary context by incorporating goals and strategies that move beyond direct perception and conventional mimetic visual modes. Drawing language and media will be researched and studied to promote personal expression and understanding of form both practically and intellectually.
Athena Title
Drawing and Visuality
Prerequisite
ARST 1050 or ARST 1050H
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall, spring and summer
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
This course requires that students develop new approaches in problem solving, conceptual thinking, experimentation, and expanded notions of drawing. Through the student’s first-hand research we will explore, study, and question the real, visible, tangible world, and drawings that record objects and events, drawings that communicate ideas, and those drawings that are transcriptions from memory. This course is designed to develop and promote idea generation, encourage mature levels of invention and problem solving, and to explore the relationship between perception and conception. The course will reinforce basic skills while increasing the sophistication of both the narrative and formal means of developing content. The organization of surface, composition and design, through line, value, volume, shape, space, texture, and color will also be considered. Through lecture, demonstrations, and studio practice we will enhance the ability of each student to develop transferable conceptual skills based on intellectual, emotional, or aesthetic rationale. Visual precedents will be studied to stimulate and increase awareness for making decisions about the visual, physical, and social aspects that inform images. • Students will demonstrate the use of various visual strategies, materials, concepts, and methodologies and processes of modern and contemporary drawing practice. • Students will become familiar with the art historical contexts and the impact of current events on the generation of that artwork. • Students will engage drawing as representation of experience rather than appearance. • Students will demonstrate the use of various models of convergent and divergent design thinking to prepare, research, and investigate visual problems, enhance verbal and graphic communication, and personal expression. • Students will also be expected to use the nomenclature that is stylistically appropriate and mature to succinctly articulate one’s work and the work of others through response papers, presentations, and critiques. During critiques students will learn to communicate for academic and professional contexts, supporting a consistent purpose and point of view while considering and engaging opposing points of view. • Students will investigate and prepare different drawing supports and surfaces. • Students will demonstrate an understanding of safe studio practices and appropriate work habits. • Students will demonstrate the ability to communicate their personal thoughts and vantage points through an expanded vocabulary of drawing. • Students will also demonstrate critical understanding through written assignments. • Students are expected to achieve a basic mastery of drawing theory and techniques with regard to mark-making, graphic ideation, mass and planar analysis, form and light, space and composition, perspective, and surface development. • Students should demonstrate the ability to work productively together on collaborative drawings.
Topical Outline
• The development of historic, modern, and contemporary practice and expression • Spatial meaning: space as distance, volume, boundary, surface, abstract space, decorative space. Space as physical, perceptual, or symbolic/imaginary • Visual strategies in compositional structure and visual process, including visual emphasis: value manipulation, selective focus, placement, and scale, etc., using additive and subtractive processes • The picture plane as the space of invention whether seen as window, stage, surface, or site • Perception and perspective: viewpoint, perspective, atmosphere, spatial distribution, overlapping forms, foreshortening, position • Line, mark-making, pentimento, and palimpsest • Chance and accident as a generative process • Investigating ambiguity: collage as both noun and verb • Texture and pattern: actual/implied texture, mark- making/patterning of marks, studies in complex composition • Scale, size, and scope: defining the shape of content • Color: color schemes and compositional mapping of color properties • Light and Psychology: value to define mood, interior vs. exterior light, artificial vs. natural light • Generating content through thematic interpretations • Reading symbols, signs and signifiers, investigating imagery, content and media
Syllabus