Art class -- what is the value of it anyway? Isn't that just something you take for fun? Well, you could do that. There is a lot more to art classes, in university, than meets the eye. They can help build critical thinking skills, offer a new perspective on the world, and provide a new form of expression.
I am going to mostly be talking about my experiences, which I understand are fairly unique. For my freshman through junior years of college, I went to a smaller branch campus that had approximately 200 students. Our art classes were taught by a local artist, not by a standard "art professor." I really appreciated this aspect as it made everything feel very grounded. This was his career, and something he was able to sustain himself doing. The two art classes I took were oil painting and drawing I, and each of them gave me a different slice of the art world.
So, art and critical thinking, what's the connection? Well, this is going to sound basic, but in order to build a coherent and put-together piece, you need to plan out and consider how you are going to put it together. You need to take basic colors and mix them (by hand!) to get a final color that you want. You're going to have to deal with a few different brush sizes when placing color on canvas. And if you put color where you don't like it? You could deal with it, that's a valid choice. Or, what I usually do, I take it off and try again. Or I come back the next day and paint over it. You are constantly in a flow of finding problems and solving them piece-by-piece, sometimes adding new problems as you go along.
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| Impression, Sunrise (1872), by Claude Monet; one of the artists inspiring the class. This piece is oil on canvas and helped to bring about the "impressionist" movement in art. (image sourced from Wikimedia Commons, public domain) |
I felt something unexpected in the middle of my first major oil piece. I felt I had this different perspective on the world. I no longer just looked out and saw the world as I thought it was, but now I could look out and see the shapes that make up the building, and the colors in the trees. I could look out and consider what that scene would look like on canvas. It was truly enlightening and gave me a whole new appreciation for the world around me. There is beauty everywhere.
One of my pieces was a drawing at Devil's Lake, in Wisconsin. The spot I chose had numerous boulders in the foreground, the lake in the middle, and the bluff in the background. I drew it rock-by-rock, filling in gaps as I went, bringing the piece together. Then, using only pencil, I shaded in each rock as I went along, exposing the sharp angular shape of the boulders. This piece taught me a lot, as usually when I go to Devil's Lake, the interesting part is the lake or maybe the bluff. But by looking at the boulders, I could get an appreciation for a different part of nature.
And lastly, art is a form of expression. Each painting or drawing ultimately carries a message from you to the viewer, and you get to decide what that message is. You could draw a seemingly mundane scene, but maybe the message is that "the mundane isn't as it seems." The message is uniquely yours, and one you should learn how to use.
That is what my art classes taught me, anyway. Have you taken an art class, and do you share similar thoughts? If the last art class you have taken was back in primary school, I seriously recommend trying it again one more time. Find a local artist who teaches classes, or even enroll in your local college, and come in with an open mind. You can take away a lot more than just what you put on the canvas.
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