Community Suppression of Art Knowledge
What happens when an art community suppresses itself? Types of Community Suppression When I was 14, my classmate, who I will call “D” and I…
Dept. of Aesthetics Blog
Does Training Ruin Artists’ Voices?
“A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.” –…
Why Not Just Use a Camera?
Cameras are just one way of translating information onto a 2D surface, but not the only way. And definitively not always the best way. There…
Art As a Collective Body of Knowledge
Is atelier training Eurocentric art? When considering mathematical concepts, rarely do people worry if the Pythagorean Theorem came from Ancient Greece, and that the symbols…
Seeing with Your Eyes and Not Assumptions
Artists work hard to lose their assumptions about what they are seeing, and truly observe the scenes before them. This is known as nurturing an…
Everything You Know About Warm and Cool Colors Is Wrong
Red, orange, yellow – warm colors right? Green, blue, purple are cool colors, right? Wrong. The truth is, that every color is both warm AND…
Art & Beauty
When artists abandon beauty and the human figure as worthy subjects, the advertising industry fills the vacuum with glee. This article explores why the creation…
Art Prodigy Propoganda
As an art teacher, nothing is more ire-inspiring to me than the proliferation of prodigy propaganda. We see them everywhere on social media – young…
THE MAGIC OF SEEING
Seeing better – like reading – is a skill that can enhance nearly every aspect of day-to-day life. My older sister learned how to read…
Art Can Be Taught, Art Can Be Learned
“…I think undoubtedly everybody ought to be taught to draw, just as much as everybody ought to be taught to read and write.” -William Morris…
Color Palettes of Iceland
Every country has its own, place-specific palette, but Iceland has some of the most unique colors of them all. Blue Lagoon Palette The Blue Lagoon…