101 Things to learn in Art School (ongoing post)

-Kit White

#1 Art can be Anything

After Marcel Duchamp

  It is not defined by medium or the means of its production, but by a collective sense that is belongs to a category of experience we have come to know as "art".





#2 Learn to Draw

After Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

Drawing is more than a tool for rendering and capturing likenesses. It is a language, with its own syntax, grammar, and urgency. Learning to draw is about learning to see. In this was, it is a metaphor for all art activity. Whatever its form, drawing transforms perception and thought into image and teaches us how to think with our eyes.

#3 "To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks." -Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

After Giorgio Morandi

Whatever we know, we know from the world that surrounds us. Art studies the world, in all its manifestations, and renders back to us not simply how we see, but how we react to what we see and what we know as a consequence of that seeing. The world is the source of all of our relationships, social and political as we ll as aesthetic. Art is a part of the world, not apart from it.

#4 Artist is the product of process

After Robert Smithson

Whether conceptual, experimental, emotional, or formal, the process you develop yields the images you produce. The materials you choose, the methods of production, and the sources of the images should all reflect the interests that command your attention. The process does not stop with each work completed. It is ongoing. The cumulative result of that process is a body of work. 

 

#5 A drawing (or a painting, photograph, and so on) is first and foremost an expression of its medium.

After Edouard Manet

The medium is the artwork's first identity. It is secondarily about what it depicts. Form shapes content. A poorly executed image remains insignificant. A well-constructed image of something seemingly insignificant can be masterful. In all great work, the subject and the means by which it is rendered are inseparable. Master your technique to protect your content.