Course Syllabus

Welcome to the Advanced Placement and Honors Studio Art program.  For some of you, this is your second year in the program.  Many will look to you for insight into how to succeed and get the most out of this experience as possible.  This letter includes important criteria that addresses the rigor and requirements of the Advanced Placement and Honors classes.  

The AP Studio Art Program makes it possible for highly motivated high school students to complete college-level work.  The Honors section of this course is modified to meet the same content but at a slower pace to allow more time for completion.  AP students are asked to submit a full portfolio to the National College Board at the end of the school year while Honors students will be asked to submit a partial portfolio to me. 

AP students at West Campus are expected to complete the following criteria:  Review and collect works from previous Pre-AP courses (i.e. Honors, 2D Art &Design, 3D Art & Design, or Photography/Photoshop) that demonstrate dedication and commitment to the concepts addressed in those courses, summer assignments (4), read Sparks of Genius by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein (if you read this book in a previous art class, you will be required to read a book from the options list (provided below), research/investigate including regular posts to Canvas leading toward completion of studio work in all Breadth (12), Concentration (12), and Quality (4) sections, preparation and set-up of AP Portfolio Shows, digital online gallery updates, and a year-end portfolio presentation. 

Honors students at West Campus are expected to complete the following criteria: Review and collect works from previous courses (i.e. Honors, 2D Art &Design, 3D Art & Design, or Photography/Photoshop) that demonstrate dedication and commitment to the concepts addressed in those courses, summer assignments (2), read Sparks of Genius by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein (if you read this book in a previous art class, you will be required to read a book from the options list (provided below), research/investigate including regular posts to Canvas leading toward completion of studio work in all Breadth (6), Concentration (6) sections,  digital online gallery updates, and a year-end portfolio presentation

The AP portfolio consists of three sections:
Quality Section:  Quality is evident in the concept, composition, and technical skills of your work.  You are asked to demonstrate quality through carefully selected examples of your work:  work that succeeds in developing your intentions, in terns of both concept and execution.  The
work must be 18"x 24"or smaller.  Students will submit 5 actual works to the College Board that shows their strengths in Drawing/2D/3D.  Honors students are not required to complete additional work in this area

Concentration Section:  In this section, you are asked to demonstrate your personal commitment to a specific visual idea or mode of working.  To do this, you should present an aspect of your work or a specific project in which you have invested considerable time, effort, and thought.  It is important to define your concentration early in the year.  Your concentrations will consist of 12 works (8-9 for 3D) that will be displayed in slide form. Honors students will submit 6 works in this section—3D will submit 4.

Breadth Section:  In this section students are asked to demonstrate the range of drawing experiences and accomplishments with a variety of art forms, concepts, and techniques.  The work you submit should demonstrate that you are able to pursue advanced drawing concepts, including observation of three-dimensional subjects and work invented or nonobjective forms.  In this section you must submit 12 (8-9 3D) slides. Honors students will submit 8 works in this section—3D will submit 4.

Students entering the AP and Honors Art programs are dedicated passionate students that are willing to invest the time and effort into completing a strong portfolio.   When completing the portfolio students’ goals should be to receive the highest score of a "5", this in many cases will ensure them college credit.  Students should also strive for scholarship award winning portfolios.  How much time and dedication will determine each outcome.  It is also suggested and encouraged that students attend weekly studio sessions during Art Club.

 

Students that are entering the AP and Honors Studio Art programs must complete the following summer criteria.  If work is not completed or not completed to the quality that is expected of a student entering the AP and Honors Studio Program, the candidate may be strongly encouraged to sign up for the non-weighted Independent Study strand of the course which is structured with less rigor than AP and Honors.

 

Visual Journal

 **IMPORTANT: Visual journals should be maintained daily and will be due on the first day of class.

 This sketch journal will be inspiration for an entire school year of artistic investigation. Students will work in their sketchbooks for the entire 2013-14 school year and use this visual journal as a resource for media studies, sketching, sensory observation, unconscious doodles, direct observations, summer experiences, journal entries, collaged materials, drawings, paintings, etc.  Recordings in your visual journal will hopefully become a resource for future works and act as inspiration in both your breadth and concentration pieces.

Format:

No smaller than 5x8”, hard bound, with high quality paper that will support both wet and dry media.

Composition:

Explore different compositions on each page. Keep anything and everything that you find interesting and use it in your artwork. Play with media and see what the possibilities are. You never know until you take the risk and this visual journal is a safe place to experiment in.

Media:

Experiment with different media. Combine mixed media, collage, and layer materials throughout the journal. Consider protecting work with a cover sheet or fixative (wax paper works well and can be taped into the binding). Painted pages should be thoroughly dried before closing. Anything can be an art material and I expect to see each student pushing this idea to its limits in their visual journal.

Organization:

Prep for Breadth: Now the fun begins. Start looking for inspiration to accomplish the above. Look at books, magazines (art journals or even popular magazines), web sites and CD covers. Look at children’s picture books.  Look at photographs in the newspaper. Spend a rainy morning at the public library. Visit the AP Central web site and look at other student work. Cut out, print out or sketch images and begin stuffing that sketchbook. Include appealing images even if the reason is not clear: maybe it’s the style, maybe it’s the color scheme, maybe it’s the use of media, maybe it’s the message. Search the web and print images. Make photographs with a digital camera. Sketch what is around you at home, outdoors or in the mall.

Prep for Concentration: Think about what you might want to explore for your concentration. Keep track of ideas a separate section in their sketchbook/journal or interspersed throughout. Students should come to the first class with multiple ideas for possible Concentrations.

Experimentation: Test out what happens if you try new things. Use non-traditional art materials. Give

yourself a chance to fail (remember the skateboard video about failure????) because your sketchbook is the place to do it. Paint up the pages before you draw on them. Rub tea onto some blank pages to make them look old. Paint with instant coffee or other things you may never have tried before. The worst thing you can do in your sketchbook is be predictable so BE ORIGINAL. You might discover something great! 

 

Summer Book Options List

Sparks of Genius: Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein

Book Description
Publication Date: August 9, 2001

Creativity isn't born, it's cultivated—this innovative guide distills the work of extraordinary artists and thinkers to show you how.  All the imagination needs to be fruitful is exercise. Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein identify the thinking tools employed by history's greatest creative minds—from Albert Einstein and Jane Goodall to Amadeus Mozart and Virginia Woolf—so that anyone with the right mix of inspiration and drive can set their own genius in motion. With engaging narratives and ample illustrations, Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein investigate cognitive tools as diverse as observing, imaging, recognizing patterns, modeling, playing, and more to provide "a clever, detailed and demanding fitness program for the creative mind" (Kirkus Reviews).

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

Book Description
Publication Date: March 1, 2009

How do we see the world around us? "The Penguin on Design" series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." "But, there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled." John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) "Sunday Times" critic commented: 'This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings ...he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.' By now he has.

Art 7 Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2001
"This is a book about making art. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people; essentially—statistically speaking—there aren't any people like that. Geniuses get made once-a-century or so, yet good art gets made all the time, so to equate the making of art with the workings of genius removes this intimately human activity to a strangely unreachable and unknowable place. For all practical purposes making art can be examined in great detail without ever getting entangled in the very remote problems of genius."
—-from the Introduction

Art & Fear explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. The book's co-authors, David Bayles and Ted Orland, are themselves both working artists, grappling daily with the problems of making art in the real world. Their insights and observations, drawn from personal experience, provide an incisive view into the world of art as it is experienced by art-makers themselves.

This is not your typical self-help book. This is a book written by artists, for artists -— it's about what it feels like when artists sit down at their easel or keyboard, in their studio or performance space, trying to do the work they need to do. First published in 1994, Art & Fear quickly became an underground classic. Word-of-mouth response alone—now enhanced by internet posting—has placed it among the best-selling books on art-making and creativity nationally.

Art & Fear has attracted a remarkably diverse audience, ranging from beginning to accomplished artists in every medium, and including an exceptional concentration among students and teachers. The original Capra Press edition of Art & Fear sold 80,000 copies.

Believing is Seeing Creating the Culture of Art by Mary Anne Staniszewski

Book Description

Release date: January 1, 1995

Why are the Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes, and Marcel Duchamp's ready-made urinal all considered works of art? Why, strictly speaking, is a Cindy Sherman photograph more "art-like" than a Da Vinci portrait? How did the painters and sculptors of the Renaissance see their creations? And who decides what art is today? In the tradition of Marshall McLuhan and John Berger, this learned and deliciously subversive book gives us a new way of seeing our artistic heritage. Believing Is Seeing is a work of multicultural scope and glittering intelligence that bridges the gulf between classical Japanese painting and the films of Spike Lee, between high theory and pop culture. Probing beyond the rhetorical surface of standard art histories and drawing on a panoramic array of illustrative material, Mary Anne Staniszewski throws a fresh light on individual works and the often mystifying criteria by which they are valued.

Learning to Look A Handbook for the Visual Art by Joshua c. Taylor

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 1981 | ISBN-10: 0226791548 | ISBN-13: 978-0226791548 | Edition: 2

Sometimes seeing is more difficult for the student of art than believing. Taylor, in a book that has sold more than 300,000 copies since its original publication in 1957, has helped two generations of art students "learn to look."

This handy guide to the visual arts is designed to provide a comprehensive view of art, moving from the analytic study of specific works to a consideration of broad principles and technical matters. Forty-four carefully selected illustrations afford an excellent sampling of the wide range of experience awaiting the explorer.

The second edition of Learning to Look includes a new chapter on twentieth-century art. Taylor's thoughtful discussion of pure forms and our responses to them gives the reader a few useful starting points for looking at art that does not reproduce nature and for understanding the distance between contemporary figurative art and reality.

‡No More Secondhand Art by Peter London

Book Description

Release date: November 18, 1989

This book is about using art as an instrument of personal transformation, enabling us to move from an inherited to a chosen state of being. Peter London offers inspiration and fresh ideas to artists, art students, and art teachers—as well as to people who think they can't draw a straight line but want to explore the joys of creative expression. Inside every person, he believes, there is an original, creative self that has been covered over by secondhand ideas, borrowed beliefs, and conditioned behavior. By freeing the capacity for visual expression—a natural human language possessed by everyone—we can awaken and release the full powers of that original self. Among the topics and exercises included are: 

   •  How to increase the ability to visualize, fantasize, and dream 
   •  Obstacles to the creative encounter and what to do about them 
   •  Experimenting with art media as true mediators between imagination and expression 
   •  Making masks to reveal the hidden self 
   •  Painting with "forbidden" colors 
   •  Arranging found objects as metaphors for one's life

The Arts and the Creation of Mind by Elliot W. Eisner

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 2004

Learning in and through the arts can develop complex and subtle aspects of the mind, argues Elliot Eisner in this engrossing book. Offering a rich array of examples, he describes different approaches to the teaching of the arts and shows how these refine forms of thinking that are valuable in dealing with our daily life
“Not since John Dewey has an American author written about art, education, and the creation of mind with such power and sensitivity.”—Michael Day, International Journal of Arts Education
“A primer for the future. . . . This book will serve as an inspiration for those needing the language to convince policy makers and curriculum developers of the value of the arts in education, while also serving as a vehicle for illustrating the educational aspirations the very best education can offer.”—Rita L. Irwin, Journal of Critical Inquiry Into Curriculum and Instruction
“[Eisner] has composed a text that is as insightful and inspirational as the educational research he envisions.”—James G. Henderson, International Journal of Education & the Arts

Students will be asked to communicate through email and Canvas.  They will have the opportunity to attend group meetings (to be announced) to critique concepts, techniques, formatting etc., and to access supplies. Meetings may vary in location including the high school, parks, and perhaps a trip to a gallery or museum (optional).  Students may also communicate with me electronically through an electronic conference if they are unable to attend scheduled meet-ups.