Teaching art to engineering students

TEACHING ARTS TO ENGINEERING STUDENTS

“Artistic and intellectual growth is cultivated by fostering creativity, innovation, critical thinking and technical proficiency". Rachel Grant

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY As a professor of art, my objectives are to build visual, conceptual and creative abilities of students that develop and enrich their art making practice, with the overall goal of implementing a career building education. Through providing a dynamic curriculum, students are encouraged to advance their drawing and design skills, develop innovative solutions and build the visual language essential to their future careers. I describe my foundation for teaching art with “The Five E’s”, establish, educate, expose, engage and encourage.

“The Five E’s” – My foundation of teaching art 1. Establish a strong art-making foundation in drawing and design through academic classroom curriculum. 2. Educate students about the history of art and visual culture, from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the present contemporary art world. 3. Expose students to art beyond the classroom through implementing field trips to museums, galleries, art centers and artist studios. 4. Engage with the community to create artworks that are relevant and meaningful to the present-day population. 5. Encourage students to create original artwork that is influenced by critical thinking and experimentation of materials and technique.

As a practicing visual artist, I have found that throughout my career, self-expression has been key in creating artworks that resonate with me as a maker and a larger audience of members and art patrons. Through maintaining an active professional art studio I am able to share a real-world view of careers in the arts with my students. Artistic and intellectual growth is cultivated by developing creativity, innovation, critical thinking and technical proficiency. In the classroom I grow these skills by first focusing on the foundation of drawing and the history of art. It is important to me to teach a solid classical foundation rooted in art history and traditional drawing techniques while exploring contemporary styles, methods, and materials. My students study visual culture from a range of periods, regions and contexts to enhance their understanding of the artwork that they create. Students who create artwork within the context of art history can engage in critical discourse. I implement visits to museums and galleries as an important teaching tool to build critical thinking skills through critique and analysis. I believe that the arts are an essential expression of the human condition past and present, therefore community engagement is also an important component to building artwork that communicates relevant and timely messages.

I am committed to excellence in teaching art, maintaining a robust studio practice, service and scholarship, providing students with the tools to be informed citizens in a global society and to succeed professionally. My classroom environment fosters a welcoming and collegial climate that promotes a culture of diversity, sensitivity, and inclusion. As an educator I believe in establishing a strong core of visual, creative and conceptual skills through knowledge of art history, contemporary art and developing technical proficiency in drawing and design. The result is learning outcomes where students think critically and creatively and are able to apply skills and knowledge to tangible visual art outcomes. Through teaching art, my goal is to produce students who will utilize their talents to not only cultivate successful careers, but to become engaged with the local community, and create art with a solid foundation of art history and contemporary art. Through implementing “The Five E’s” and focusing on a student-centered approach, my classroom environment fosters emerging artists to freely explore and innovate new and personalized methods of reaching their creative potential.

TEACHING ARTS TO ENGINEERING STUDENTS Teaching art to masters and Ph.D. level engineering students at the Georgia Institute of Technology with Dr. Francesco Fedele presented a unique challenge and positive results. The students enrolled in an elective course to learn advanced concepts on geometry and studying Einstein and Picasso, influential figures who blurred the lines between science and art, and the foundations of drawing by hand. The overarching goal of the engineering course was to cultivate students who strongly connect art and science, evolving dynamic critical thinkers in their fields of study. We started the course learning the basic rules of art and laying a solid foundation in drawing concepts. These included observing and drawing positive and negative space. The first exercise was to draw a plant to encompass the entire paper plane, touching three sides to build a dynamic visual composition. Here students learned that one must pay attention to all aspects of space when drawing from life, including the negative space between plant leaves, creating depth and interest in a drawing. From here we focused on mark making, paying attention to contour line weight, learning how to draw gestures, and practicing the skill of sighting and measuring. Value scales were rendered in student sketchbooks utilizing random marks, stippling, cross hatching and hatching. Students learned about the seven elements of art, line, shape, space, value, form, texture and color. All of these concepts came together in a still life drawing of the artist’s shoe.

STUDENTS’ SKETCHES TO PRACTICE SHADING. STUDENTS PRACTICE VALUE SCALES.

STUDENTS’ SHOE DRAWINGS STUDENTS’ SHOE DRAWINGS

The course took place during fall semester. The second still life drawing was a “Spooky Still Life”, playfully including themes of the Halloween holiday featuring skulls and pumpkins. In this work students learned about the principles of design to organize visual elements in their drawings with unity, variety, contrast, emphasis, balance, movement, repetition and rhythm. The still life arrangement included items that encouraged the students to explore all concepts previously learned, such as spheres, cones, and a variety of textures including fabrics and reflective glass. For this and previous drawings the students worked with vine and compressed charcoal. Next students learned about one-point and two-point perspective, identifying vanishing points and horizon lines to execute accurate shapes. During this exercise students were also introduced to the full range of H and B graphite pencils to render dynamic drawings.

SPOOKY STILL LIFE ARRANGEMENT SPOOKY STILL LIFE DRAWING

Now that the class learned the basic “rules” of drawing, we started to take the road less traveled and draw from the imagination. To build a conceptual foundation we looked to art history. Starting with the traditional still life as we did in our drawing exercises, we studied the 16th and 17th century Dutch symbolism in art history. We also investigated the work of Surrealists from the 1920s, who took realistic objects and created a fantasy dream-like world in their art. For their next assignment, the class was provided a vase of flowers for drawing reference, and then to add imagined elements. The result was creative drawings that utilized the artist’s imagination to blend flowers with music, landscape, portraiture, and more.

STUDENTS FIGURE DRAWING

Drawing the figure is a challenging task for introductory students, but can also be highly rewarding. As an introduction, students practiced drawing their own hands in their sketchbooks. We partnered with the Atlanta Artist Center to offer evening figure drawing classes during our course time exclusively for our students. The drawing sessions featured both male and female models. The students applied concepts of gesture drawing, contour line drawing and realistic rendering with shading during a variety of timed poses by the models.

SELF-PORTRAIT BY EMILY SANDERS SELF-PORTRAIT BY PENGXIAO XU

Practicing figure drawing was the perfect lead into our final assignment, self-portraiture. The class received a lecture on portraiture through time, from the historical Leanardo da Vinci’s 1510 “Portrait of a Man in Red Chalk” to the contemporary Yayoi Kusama 2010 “Self-Portrait”. The students were given the freedom to use any drawing material of their choice, and were encouraged to implement the elements, principles and techniques learned during this course to their artwork. The final class result was an exhibition and reception at the Mason Building, home of the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The student artwork was on display and the exhibition included artwork by the instructors. Throughout the semester the students participated in group critiques, developing a vocabulary to explain and discuss their work. The students used their new ability to explain and discuss artwork in a presentation of work by the artists. This conclusion to the semester provided an opportunity for the students to share their artwork with peers, professors and the community, exposing many to the unique intersection of art and geometry.