Visual Arts

Department Philosophy

As a community of artists who teach, the visual arts faculty wants to enhance our students’ understanding of the visual world. We want to help them develop an appreciation for a range of work by artists from a variety of cultures and backgrounds, develop confidence in their own instincts, foster a willingness to take risks and, finally, achieve a high level of satisfaction from the act of creating.

To accomplish this, our visual arts courses not only include instruction in studio techniques, but slide lectures, discussions, and group critiques of class work. As a faculty, we are equally comfortable in demystifying the studio process for the beginning student as we are in challenging the most advanced adolescent Rembrandt. The first thing you notice in our studio classrooms, after the benign anarchy, is the focused energy. Seniors work with freshmen, boys with girls, the accomplished with the inexperienced, and most importantly, attitudes and opinions span the critical spectrum. The soccer goalie is analyzing Citizen Kane in Filmmaking; the computer whiz is struggling to make the clay stay on the wheel in Ceramics I; the senior who riveted the community with her chapel this morning wrestles with the fundamentals of perspective in Drawing. Then, at the end of the day, week, or semester, we, as faculty artists, return to our own studios to pursue work in the same media that we teach.

We believe that the arts embody many of the lessons that all of us must learn and that students intuitively understand as relevant to their lives. Learning how to take risks; to cultivate curiosity; to accept and learn from failure; to express joy, anger, or sorrow in a constructive way; to tolerate the new or unusual while developing standards for judging quality and integrity. Ultimately, we want to show students that the process in the darkroom, painting, or ceramics studio is the same process of inquiry that underlies every endeavor they are involved in at CA. We want our students to understand that the millions of years of image making and form building amount to nothing less than the history of human concern with all the peaks, blind alleys, and dead ends that mirror our own daily existence. Simply put, making art is life affirming.

We believe that in the era of a shrinking planet, the arts offer us our best opportunity to expose students to the variety of cultures and lifestyles that they will be rubbing shoulders with in the twenty-first century. Art provides a tactile and visual doorway to another culture’s emotional history. Empathy is the best antidote to the fear, ignorance, and apathy that seem to dominate the today’s headlines. We do not urge students to take art just to make them well rounded individuals; the role of our program is to provide them with an emotional and intellectual reservoir of experience that they will be able to draw on for the rest of their lives.