Instructor: Dru Colbert

Each week, students enrolled in this studio art course complete an informal writing assignment that serves as the springboard to the creation of a work of visual art. In a recent class, students wrote about daily rituals and their connection to identity, and then created prints using a method inspired by Mesopotamian cylinder stamps.

Students endeavored to tell not only the story of their ritual, but to connect that ritual, through multiple layers of visual narrative, to the larger themes embedded in our cultural experiences. Responding to a print depicting a woman getting out of bed and opening the curtains in her bedroom, instructor Dru Colbert noted, "There are flaws...it's not a perfect print. What this says to me is that our lives aren't perfect. Things don't always go the way we want them to go. Our lives are fraught with smudges and fingerprints."

Participating in critiques of one another's work strengthens the learning process. As they experiment with different choices of medium, color, texture, form, and perspective, students come to understand how these choices affect the way their classmates "read" or interpret the visual narrative. First year student Laura Pohjola of Finland says that the critique sessions provide "a unique opportunity to be given individual, constructive critique and to learn to give it as well." According to Pohjola, whose interests include art education and art therapy, the course has helped her to develop confidence in her art, while strengthening her technical skills and deepening her knowledge of art history.

Third year student Gabriel Finkelstein of Hope, Maine describes the class as a "binary study of the self and the evolution of human creativity." Throughout the course, students examine key points in world history that mark transitions in material, technique, or pictorial devices employed by artists, while exploring and inventing innovative forms of composition to tell their own stories in new ways.

Says Finkelstein, "telling our personal stories is essentially part of being alive, sharing, and developing a stronger sense of ourselves. It's amazing to do this through art while paralleling stories of the past. Today's tools and technology make our lifestyles incredibly different from those of the Mayan's, but looking at the major developments they made with significantly less is phenomenal. Can we ever reconnect with that sense of wisdom?"

Course Readings

• Man and His Symbols, Jung
• Visual Thinking, Visual Culture: The Reader, Evans & Hall
• Semiotics of Art, Matejka & Titunik
• Rethinking Visual Anthropology, Banks & Morphy
• Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images, Stafford
• The Creative Explosion: Inquiry into the Origin of Art and Religion, Pfeiffer
• Envisioning Information, Tufte
• The Rise of the Sixties, Crow
• Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, Lippard.