Christian

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Reinventing an Education in the Art of Painting

It is widely understood that there is a great lack of art education in the American School System. This is due to many reasons, from funding to a lack of qualified teachers. The opportunities for many students to mold and develop their primary talents and abilities are almost nonexistent. The following material outlines a new approach to art education and how to effectively infuse art into the schools at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches.

This redesign of art education is meant to be effective from the elementary education system to the university level. The assumption is that at all levels of art education, we are not recognizing and fostering the talents and natural skills of gifted students and training them for professional skills. We have also neglected giving the general students the opportunity to explore artistic expression and benefit from its proven help in learning other disciplines.

There have been many studies and pilot programs focused on bringing more art education into the schools, and the effects are well documented. Increases in student learning capabilities, self-esteem, discipline issues, and the over-all positive effects on society’s problems are evident. A program in Brazil started giving instruments and providing learning to under privileged children, and the results were so impressive that the program is spreading internationally. In Toronto, a program of placing Artist in Residence into the secondary schools and is in its second five-year testing phase and is being expanded. The plan outlined here if implemented could create a renaissance in art education for the state and over time bring a level of art production, appreciation, and industry unseen in our state. In every school there is a Jane or Johnny who can draw like an angel. This plan seeks to identify and bring special attention to that child while addressing all our students’ needs to explore art for all its positive effects.

This proposal calls for the fusion of the professional art world with that of the educational process. It also calls for a new understanding of what art education is and should consist of at different levels of a student’s maturity. By using the educational institutions to support the development of professional artists and in exchange the professional shares his or her world with our students, a symbiotic relationship could provide a higher quality art education and open the doors to real careers for gifted art students.

I. Core problems with our current educational system’s method of delivering an arts education and how to over come these issues and deliver a quality education in the visual arts. Poor funding is an accepted issue in all areas of concern.

A. Fundamental reasons why the schools and universities of America have failing grades in educating our young in the Visual Arts:

1. A lack of understanding on how to educate a student in the visual arts
2. A lack of understanding of how a student develops artistic abilities
3. Missed aligned educational priorities
4. Lack of exposure to the arts compounded by distance from population centers

B. Problems within the elementary and high school education systems

1. Lack of understanding on how and when to apply art instruction in the visual arts
2. Lack of qualified teachers and support for those who are
3. Poor or nonexistent curriculum
4. Lack of materials and supplies

C. Problems within the university education system

1. The abandonment of classic skills and traditions
2. A disconnects between the educational and professional art world

II. Solutions through a change of philosophy, priorities, delivery, and opportunity

A. Fundamental changes needed for an effective education in the visual arts

1. Bringing qualified art instruction into the educational process.
2. The development of a summer school complex for K-12
3. Bring about a fusion of technology into art educational process
4. The development of an interactive Internet-based educational delivery system
5. Increasing the volume of creative materials available to students at all levels
6. To bringing the universities and colleges into a new program of interactivity with the public school systems within their sphere of influence by redesigning the student teaching programs
7. The creation of a Nonprofit Art Agency designed to facilitate professional relationships for students, teachers, and professional artists
8. Start up Funding and the potentials of self-funding in the future

Over the last decade, the art markets have been under assault by the East Europeans, not Christy’s or Sotheby’s, but the markets that support regional and local professionals and art students alike. It is an assault on the small galleries, the small regional art centers spotted across the country. Art painted by hundreds of unknown artists working in the art world’s version of sweatshops, turning out European reproductions and Old World contemporary works. The art markets have been flooded with them, coming into the country by shiploads, and the markets are eating them up. Why is this happening? To many Europeans, art is every day life. Europe is covered with art, every little town has its own form of art, and every great city is living art. Their students have the opportunity to experience it, grow to understand it, appreciate it, and incorporate and benefit from it. For the gifted and focused student of art, opportunity is ample. They train their artists in the Old World approach with a focus on a standard of technical skill. On another note, have you seen the quality of Western Style Painting performed by Chinese Art Students?

Over the last decade, the professional traditional artists have lost the patronage of an entire industry. Once the domain of some of world’s best painters and many regional and local artists, the markets for book covers and illustrations have been taken over by the computer graphic industry. Using technology, much of the illustration industry has moved from this country to centers in the Far East. Technology has entered the art world and brought with it profound effects on the opportunities for employment in the arts for both students and professionals.

In the days of Rembrandt, one of the primary exports from the Netherlands to the rest of Europe, was art. We read about the few great artists like Rembrandt and Frans Halls, but at that time, there were thousands of artists churning out high quality paintings for the markets. You were not in the profession unless you could paint to a given standard. That standard was “the minimum quality that the free enterprise markets would consume.” Three hundred years ago a society could train thousands of artists to be successful professionals. Can we say the same?

It is time to ask ourselves why, at other times in history and in other parts of the world, societies have been so much more effective in creating artists who display a competence in their art beyond what is seen in this country today? How are other societies evolving with a changing world and coming to dominate our art markets? And why are these questions not being addressed or even asked by our halls of academia? Is it not the job of educational institutions to prepare our art students to be future professional artists? Their job to keep our artists on the leading edge of the profession? Is it not their responsibility to set a standard for competence in all areas of art?

In the American University Art World lie the problems that affects the quality of art education in this country and almost every other issue that impacts the art world and our society as a whole. Our academia is frozen in the philosophies of modernism and over the last sixty years lost all their resources to teach the skills of the masters. Those schools and instructors that are trying to return a focus on technical skills do not seem to know how. Our schools are filled with inbred educators isolated from the effects of the art markets. With no demand placed on them for artistic performance or production by the professional art world or society as a whole, they have evolved an art education system that only leads back to them. They graduate teachers but the fine art graduates go find jobs outside their chosen endeavor and do their art as a hobby with hopes of someday being a professional. They have no other choice.

I believe that the problems I am pointing out are very unique conditions applicable to the visual art departments alone in our colleges and universities. The man in the street or the parents of art students do not perceive this problem. They see great accomplishment in the other disciplines such as sciences and technology and have a view that all departments achieve a degree is successful instruction

The disconnect between the academia and those on the outside is a profound one. One past Dean of the Art Department of Pittsburg State University was interviewing a young art student for a graduate school program and was discussing the issue of his teaching undergraduate painting classes. When the student offered to teach watercolor the Dean got very upset and replied, “We do not want those techniques taught here. It is not our job to teach these students how to make a living or how to get a job. We are here to give them a creative experience!”

What has happened to art education in this country? Why is it that the traditional classical painting and sculpture techniques are not supported by the teachers of art? It is a multisided problem. Human ego, competing philosophies, an inbred system, and a lack of knowledge, all play a part. History is always the teacher, and it tells us that others have done it and so can we if we have the will. A seventh of our society, a seventh of all our school children have their primary talents and natural directions in the arts. Those abilities are totally neglected and we as a society have not given those students even a chance at realizing them. I’m going to outline a way that we can change just that, and in the process, make Texas a recognized player in the art world.

I
A (1) If we are going to be successful in positively impacting the arts and art education, we must first understand how a child learns to be artistic. Can you create an artist or are they specially gifted individuals with talents that come magically out of the right arm. We see these children drawing and many of us adults are amazed by this wonderful gift. Research was done back in the seventies that asked the question, when it was most beneficial for a child to have artistic experiences. What was clear from it all was that the most important time for a child to have artistic experiences was between the years of six months and four years old. The time when the brain grows the most, forming the gray matter and building neuron connections. We’re not talking about formal training of any kind but exposure to the experience of things appearing when dad puts a pencil in our hand or watching mom splashing bold colors on something, being exposed to creative processes. Having the opportunity to scribble all you would want is what starts those synapses in the brain firing. There is a young girl in California, only fourteen or so and she is getting over two hundred thousand dollars for her paintings and has appeared on CNN and PBS several times. She is quite talented for her age but she is also the daughter of parents who are both painters. This means she was crawling around the studio, getting into mom’s paint or dad’s brushes. She was exposed to and had opportunity to play and interact with color, drawing, designing, all the basics of being an artist. We see examples in history such as John Singer Sargent, who drew like a master at age seven. His whole family was amateur artists, going on drawing excursions, and filling page after page of drawing books. Case after case, we see great artists coming from families of artists and have assumed it to be gifted genetics but I contend that this is not necessarily the case. One of the founders of the Art Students League of New York, Robert Henri said, “Artist are born, not made!” What he meant by this was that artists evolve because they are born with talent, at the right time to the right family with the right opportunities to learn as they go through life. It’s not just talent but the opportunities that create an artist and we in Texas have not created those opportunities for our children.

A (2) There is little our school system can do to affect our children in the preschool years except through education of the parents, which we will address through parental contact through an Arts Education Internet Site. Our primary concern is when they get into preschool and on. If we are going to be effective in using art to help all students increase their learning abilities in all educational endeavors, we must focus on what type of artistic exercises and learning experiences we apply at a given age or level of development. Like the piano is considered the core instrument of music, drawing is the core of all the visual arts. It is the exercise of trying to draw that puts the most charge in the developing brain. It is the exercise where the student forms and begins to master a three-dimensional world within his mind, beginning to understand space and form, light and dark, perspective. It is the primary artistic endeavor that affects our ability to think on many other levels such as abstract analysis. The power to draw is something that only the student can develop internally. We cannot teach drawing; we can only help the student see and calculate. For this reason, one of the keys to creating little masters of art is to keep them supplied with pencils and paper and to encourage and expect them to draw and draw. There are two areas we should start teaching very young students from the start, drawing and the science and mathematics of color. These two core areas of study can be applied at the early ages of K-6. Not until junior high or high school are they ready to expand their art studies to all the various art related endeavors. In the Old World, the average age for a student to enter an artist’s studio for study was fourteen years old.

A (3) In the old days, when a young artist with potential and desire would enter the studio of a teacher, he would spend his first couple years learning to mix paint. They didn’t have tubes to buy so all the pigments were mixed from scratch. If I may quote John Howard Sanden, the founder of the Portrait Institute of New York, “What a painter does most in their career is to commit color mixtures to memory.” Color is easy to teach when it is approached scientifically and mathematically, but as I have stated, the institutions are stuck in the philosophy of the Modernist, which rejected the science of art.

When I refer to the philosophy of the Modernist Movement, the issues that are important have to do with teaching from only this one approach and rejecting all others. Modernism really took hold of the art world in the twenties and thirties. For the first thousand years of art, the artists strive to be great realists, to be the best at saying the most with a single stroke of the brush. From Velazquez to Sargent, a classical standard of performance evolved. The Impressionists though changed somewhat, maintained this standard, but then for the first time in history, the Post- Impressionist started abandoning them. Matisse once said, “I don’t care what red it is, if it’s red use Cadmium Red!” It was this point in history when the art of color mixing started to fade from the art scene. By the thirties and forties, artists were rejecting every artistic standard of the past. The reasons and importance for this evolution in painting has been debated since the beginning and has created a riff in the profession ever since. We must understand that behind it all is human nature, the desire to excel and stand apart, to be considered important and be remembered. It’s what we all want to a degree, to be considered relevant. In the history of painting, we as a profession had reached the pinnacle; we had perfected the art of realistic painting by the eighteen hundreds. How could one be greater than Rembrandt or Sargent and what could the individual artists do to be considered important to their chosen profession. It’s a simple answer, to be different and hope the world sees your contribution as important. This is the time in history when we see the rise of the “Isms.” Of the approximately twenty-nine classifications of styles of art from Realism to Pop Art, twenty-four were invented between 1800 and 1960. Artists were all over the board looking for any form of artistic expression that they could find in order to be unique. Since we had accumulated artistic knowledge for a thousand years, the only direction was to throw away bits and pieces of knowledge. This is why we see paintings with just lines or splashes of color. The man in the street often wonders why we as a society view many of the Modernist works as important. The contemporary art historian will give you many reasons why these works are important, but the core reason is that they are simply different from anything done before them. The goal for the artists in this century changed from quality to uniqueness. This is why we see the shock art of today like the Christ suspended in urine or the cow pies on the Madonna that recently created the uproar in New York and threatened the funding of the hosting museum. It is an effort of an artist to show people something they have never seen before, to confront the viewer in a way he or she has not been impacted by a piece of art before. This goal is a fine and important one for every artist to strive for though many of us question the value of some approaches the artists use. What is wrong with this approach is that our educators have adopted it and rejected all others. Our schools decided that this was the only goal our artists should strive for, to obtain the intelligentsia’s requirement for historical recognition, to be unique. They adopted the view that there was no reason to teach technical skills to our students; learning to paint the apple would not help achieve the goals they have pontificated upon the profession. In effect, they have created several generations of art students who possess no traditional painting skills and have only the options of art forms that require no real skills, that is to be some incarnation of an abstractionist. We do not give our students the “tools” to be creative, the skills to take any approach they want to their art.

The academia has never been concerned with the needs of the gallery industry or other commercial concerns attached to the art profession. On the other side of the coin, I have never met a painting or sculpture professor who didn’t want a gallery to market their work. Most will profess that they would not bend their principles to meet a gallery demand and they do have the freedom not to, they have a university pay check. In reality, the individual instructors who perform an art don’t seem to really know how to promote themselves. On a resent visit to the University of Texas at Austin, after the tour they gave us a CD they produced to promote their art school. In a section where they introduce a few of their instructors, there is a quote from one where he says the he had tried to be a professional artist for a few years and just couldn’t cut it so he joined the staff at UT.” Promoting ones self or what one does is part of learning to do business in almost any capitalistic endeavor yet our schools don’t know how to promote themselves. How can our colleges teach our students to be professionals when they themselves lack the knowledge or skills to be? It’s what every parent expects when they spend so much money on tuition to these institutions? We expect a school to give our children the abilities and opportunities to be successful and that means being able to making a living and becoming a productive member of society in their chosen field.

A (4) In our society, the opportunities for our young students to be exposed and interact with the art world are few. The reasons go back to what the art world has been teaching or hasn’t been teaching. There are so few great professional artists that many students will be lucky to meet one in their lifetime. Walking through museums, watching films, reading books, and visiting galleries are very beneficial, but what really moves a young student is to see and interact with a real artist, one who is creating art and touching society on a local or national level. Artists to whom they can relate to when they try to draw an apple, the family house, or the face of a friend, and see that there are real world benefits to becoming an artist and that they too could do it.

B (1) In turning to the problems with art education in our K-12 levels, one problem is that it has been treated like reading, writing, and arithmetic. Learning to draw, paint, see the world with a creative artistic eye. These are skills that students mostly teach themselves. You cannot teach a child how to draw; you can only show him how you can draw. You can ask him to slow down, study with a close eye, but you cannot help him make the hand, mind, and eye connections for them. It happens when the vision and process crystallize in the mind's eye. What we can do is attempt to trigger connections; to stimulate the learning of a skill like drawing, and the best time for this is usually around three years old. We should also include all forms of child’s crafts for their broad effects on learning. Funds have not been the primary problem and more will do nothing to make it better without tuning the curriculum. Only a radical rethinking of what constitutes an art education, what skills and abilities are teachable, and then how can we deliver it effectively and at reasonable cost, and then we can fix this problem once and for all.

B (2) A problem that has been around as long as public schools have existed is a severe lack of good art teachers and support for those who are. This is not the fault of the teachers in the field; they have been wrongly trained. I do not believe any teacher approaches their students with more desire and excitement to train than those who teach art. Much of what they do is very beneficial to our students, but they do not address the gifted child. When confronted with one in need of special attention, the good teachers go looking for sources to help. They are always left disappointed because there are few sources out there to help. Our universities should be the source for that help, but they are not. Why is this?

B (3) Our teachers need to be taught in the sciences of drawing and color. Both areas of concern that are very teachable even to those who do not draw well. Ninety nine percent of the artists in the field are not destined for fame, they just want to be artist and create art for a living. There are students of art who want to satisfy themselves through performing in all the styles of art, to please their communities and support their families through the production of their own hands. It does not take a born master to become a competent artisan and perform at a very marketable quality.

B (4) When funding issues arise, the first area for cuts is the Visual Arts Department. It has been the frill class; the area of learning that is for fun but not serious study. In the past, art has not been viewed as a prime career choice yet every art dealer out there is looking for artists, hurting for new talent to promote, needing fresh artistic visions to hang on their walls. People have to realize that being an artist is a very fulfilling profession; and if one can produce quality, a richly rewarding life can be obtained. It is skill and ability that will let one command his or her own destiny, to be independent and free to survive with your own two hands. A good regional artist can earn thousands of dollars for their works and never be New York material. Painting pretty pictures that are sought after by the masses is a worthy and honorable goal for an artist and can be very rewarding to the artist and to society. I dare say that the art the pretty picture makers are creating and we’re buying and putting into our homes do more for society than the art the intelligencia has been putting into museums. Proper art funding is one of the keys to creating a successful approach to art education, but setting new priorities is more important for success.

C (1) If the will exist to change the way art is taught, the core of the problem must be confronted. A change in philosophy must be made at the university level. They must decide on what are the core skills of an artist, set standards, apply new curriculums, bring in new teachers with the abilities, and start working with commercial interest. Since we are talking mainly of our college and university systems, I do not believe this will evolve anytime soon.

C (2) From the intelligentsia’s point of view, for an artist to let money influence what he creates is to be immoral. Can we expect them to teach what they claim is immoral? For this reason I believe that the approach of a symbiotic professional institution that can slowly develop tighter relationships with the entire school structure is the perfect approach. Texas is lucky, we have many world class artists to draw upon and many have already expressed interest in this proposed project if it comes into reality.

II
There is no better time than now to start a process of reinventing the way we deliver a visual arts education in our state. With future budget concerns, more children being left behind, and good teachers a scarcity, it should be a major priority for us all. We have the resources in our state, resources that no other state has. We can do something so innovative and effective that it would be a model for the rest of the world. It would call for a new alliance of professionals and educators, government and communities. The key to bringing these entities to the table in a successful union is to harmonize their goals and use the assets of each to support the other and at the same time not threaten each group’s position in the game. Professionals who are not wildly successful in the markets and have to work hard to make it are usually very tight with their knowledge. They teach the basics but the little things that make their art unique and special, they usually hold close to the vest and share it only with specially gifted students they select. We have to get them to take a chance in creating their own competition. The university instructors will have to learn to prepare students in a way that will give them the knowledge and skills to work and assist professionals. They will need to tune their core curriculum to focus on the crafts of the different art forms so our students are prepared to learn form the professionals. Over time, all this can be obtained, but time can be measured in lives. The question is, “how do we do it fast, cheap, effective, and step on the fewest toes possible?” The answer is a fusion of business principles into the entire mix of players required to make it happen. With the fusion of some ancient ideas and modern innovative thinking, we can not only revolutionize art education, but also be responsible for changing the future potentials for thousands and hundreds of thousands of students into the future.

A (1) The way we can bring in new educators and new knowledge into the educational process is through what is called an, “Artist-in-Residence Program.” This has been a tool that universities have used for hundreds of years in one form or another. When a university wanted to be associated with a great achiever, be it one in science, art, or literature, they offered the individual a studio or science lab, students to assist them, and a stipend for support. They were to do their own research or art and the students were there to assist them in their commercial endeavors. It allowed the student access to understanding the artists and their personal approach to their art. It benefited the artist by giving him or her an honored position in society, a seal of approval, which helped their recognition factor and commercial viability. It also increased their production volume. The university also gained prestige through the association by being able to expose their students to the greatest minds from a given profession.

As for primary education, Toronto has taken the artist-in-residence program into the schools and is in its second five-year program. It has been so successful that they have expanded it in the second phase. What we must do is fuse many of these great programs and use what works and is applicable. My proposal is to create a parallel educational structure that fuses with all levels of education through an artist in residence format. This approach has many benefits, and one of the most important factors is that it can be developed without threatening the establishment. We will have to take a slightly unique approach to the establishment of these programs. In order to touch all our student’s state wide, we need to create a program of artist-in-residence that has an association with all our education institutions, not as it was done in the past with a single institution though a single entity can be the parent.

For grades K-12, we have different needs on different levels. In grades K-6, art should be a daily class with all sorts of artistic fun things to do, mixed with a serious approach to drawing, coloring, and clay projects for 3-D exploration. I believe it is an important benefit in developing a student’s powers of perception in many varied subjects. The current system could be refined and very effective if we could start providing those teachers with art materials for their students.

On the 7-12 grade levels, I propose fading out of art as a class subject and move art to something more like a sport program. With the adoption of an artist-in-resident program somewhat like the Toronto model for high school, the professional artist for that given school would lead the educational efforts of the art clubs. As an elective, it will draw those students who are inclined towards the art and not the easy hour taker. Treat it like a sport club, and fund it to do school and community art projects. For a given number of schools in a district, we could have a certified teacher oversee the local artists-in-residence and fill in where the professional is weak. With the money not spent on a teacher’s salary, we could provide the artists clubs with a lot of materials, which again I say is vital for the artistic growth of our students. It would create far more learning to expose these students to good artists creating their art and giving them the materials to create art themselves than spending the money on certified art teachers for each school.

I would like to point out that there is a large source of professional quality talent for these programs. Across the country is an army of retirees and young people who have been going to workshops with professionals and studying art for decades on their own. With a package of incentives that can support their art, we can entice many of these individuals to take up residence in empty classrooms where the art classes used to be.

For a program that offers the incentives for the professional artist community to get involved at all levels, we must first focus on the hub of the educational program. Having looked at our state for the best single location for an artist to live and create, I found the one location in the state where we could do it, Jefferson Texas. It is a Louisiana town on the Texas side of the boarder, the best of two worlds. Subject matter from the homes and environments of the genteel South, Norman Rockwell backdrops, stunning nature scenes, and a developing tourist market all within one hundred yards from each other. A perfect place for master artists to teach all forms of art with all forms of subject matter to call upon. To achieve bringing in world class talent, we must create the incentives to do so. Since successful professionals are usually very well established with their markets and usually have roots with family and friends, they will not be easy to move so we must be able to offer something they do not have and benefits they can realize through relocation. The most important things we can offer a successful professional would be:

1. a more creative environment
2. enhanced markets
3. more recognition
4. and an opportunity to make a difference

Texas has never been a recognized art market and has been viewed by most of the art world as rich but unsophisticated. New Mexico isn’t exactly booming with intelligentsia, but they do have Santa Fe, a town of over one hundred and sixty galleries that was started by great artists that located there. Consider the volume of art sales that is required to support that many galleries with salaries and overhead. There isn’t another city like it from there to the East Coast. Jefferson holds the potential to be one and it can be built in a few short years if we make it the home of this proposed entity. With it as the anchor, a small industry of art workshops and schooling in the arts could develop and draw patronage from all over the south and southwest.

One important concern is the use of technology in art. We must start teaching the fusion of technology into art. On my resent visit to UT Austin, I asked the department head if they had a computer graphics department and he said no. I was amazed at this because technology has rushed into the professional art word. Architects, designers, even painters are using computers to design with and some are even using it to create finished products. The Intelligentsia says that artists should not concern themselves with money and markets, yet the establishment has intentionally shunned and rejected the use of technology. There is one currently acclaimed artist whose work is going into many of the great museums of the world, designs his work on a computer and then hires sign painters to paint his computer-designed image on a canvas for him. He is very picky about the sign painters he hires. This artist never picked ups a brush but “his paintings” are bringing four and five hundred thousand dollars, and he has one in the new Guggenheim Museum in Spain. The professionals are using technology and always have. With the publication with David Hockney's book, Secret Knowledge; rediscovering the lost techniques of the old masters, he shows two hundred year of artists using the latest technologies to help them build their paintings. In the last ten years computer graphic artists have taken 90+% of the book illustration market away from the domain of the paint and pencil artists. The new generation of students has been raised on computers. If we are going to open up a world of careers for our kids in the arts, we have to give them the ability to beat the rest of the world in quality, performance, and speed of production. These are business principles and an artist must be able to command and control these factors to stay in business. If we do not use technology, we cannot produce a superior performance and at a competitive price for many forms of art. That is what being a professional artist is all about once the artist has his or her art at a world class quality and are dealing with market trends and shifting cost. Technology in its many forms assists the artists in all these issues. Our universities offer no classes in any of these related subjects to prepare their art students to be professionals in a modern technological world.

The innovative use of technology can be a key to bringing a new level of art education to the classroom. It can help move our students through the educational process at individually accelerated rates and give the student access to educational material at home, so they can consume knowledge to their hearts content. If we design the right content, develop the digital teaching tools, and make sure our students who need it have access to it, you will see a renaissance of art here in a part of the world that my father called the “cultural wilderness.”

We must also seek funding to build a leading edge Internet presence. This would call for a special artist’s studio for recording content, equipment for creating graphic animations for teaching illustrations, for production of critical documentary material, and for access to film archives on art from public and private sources. This would include demonstrations in different art forms; lectures, graphic enhanced instruction programs, and animated art lessons for young students. To reach the young mind and make a difference, the secret is in animated graphics. There is a reason why parents have to drag their children’s head out of their computer games. We need to create educational material that really takes the child’s mind into a New World and educate them as it entertains them. We could make learning fun and all consuming, with computer interactive technologies, we could provide massive sensory input which leads to good learning and eventually reach a new standard of educational capability. I would like to point out that such a site should be our number one priority to find funding for. If we want to impact those who hunger for knowledge, they will find it and us on the Internet if we build it. Let us build the ultimate Internet site designed to teach the fundamentals of art and give away the secrets of the masters once and for all.

Increasing the volume of creative materials available to students at all levels is one of the most critical issues we should face. Again I say that artistic performance in the visual arts is something each child learns internally through trying. There is not that much material we need to be teaching young students. We just need to create the opportunity to create art. There is plenty of time in their college years to become educated in art history and get deep into the elements of design. We can assist them more by bringing in more interactivity through a new approach to the student teaching programs of the local colleges and an artist-is-residence influence. To make the unions happy, maybe we have an art teacher that covers several schools and works with and over sees the artist in residence.

An important and core entity that is required to bring markets to our students and to train our art student’s how to work with the markets would be a nonprofit art agency. An art agency would build associations with dealers, galleries, art consultants, and collectors both private and corporate. It would be charged with helping individual artists connect with dealers who need fresh talent and selected subject matter. Another function of the agency would be to track art projects. The Federal Government mandates that all public building that receive government funds, must by law spend a given percentage of the funds on art for the building. Tracking and seeking such projects for our top artists to do with their graduate understudies could provide wonderful incentives for attracting top artists to the program. It would give our artists and our educational efforts very high visibility and recognition throughout the country. The agency would run our school’s galleries, promote student artists, the seek commissions and should function as a professional agency. In it’s galleries, it should charge retail and earn a 40% commission as is traditional in the industry and the student would understand that to earn six hundred dollars, they need to create a thousand dollars worth of art. As an agency facilitating relationships between our students and the market industry, it should earn a small three to five percent commission to just cover cost. Once the student graduates to professional status, the artists is free to deal with their markets on their own. If we can bring markets to us and create a conduit to outside markets, the artists we train in Texas will be able to stay and contribute to our state through their career. The agency should be active in putting together art projects and funding opportunities. By knowing what types of funding are available from the multitude of sources and by tracking proposed art projects, the agency could help make projects possible and at the same time create more opportunities for our artists.

Another function of the art agency is to create a learning environment for art history graduates. History grads move into professional careers in gallery sales, art consulting, art agents, and other commercial occupations that the universities do not prepare them for. The greatest art dealer in American history was Leo Castelli. When asked how it was that he had the vision and know how and introduce so many important art movements in the twentieth century, he replied, “knowing what is new and undiscovered is a fact of simply knowing art history.” An education in art history is the foundation of most of the careers involved in the marketing of art.

Funding is the biggest issue in any endeavor and as with any other, this proposal will need its champions. It will require support from the university system, the secondary school system, the private sector, state government, and concerned citizens. The key is putting a package together that can bring benefits to all parties. The people of the Jefferson Institute have had a vision for their community that can benefit all the issues we are interested in as art educators and professionals. For them, it is community development. For the artists it means jobs, commissions, and a stage from which to gain recognition. For the people of Texas, it can open the doors to new forms of employment and increased market activity. For our educators, it can help them prepare our students better for the future. If all these concerned parties could come together with common cause, we could revolutionize art education. Through creative partnerships with business, we can create a system that could draw a major portion of its future budgets from current and future art markets. Instead of building another tax payer supported entity, it should be designed and run as a “for-profit” industry so to be as self-funding as possible.

In closing, this paper represents one vision of what is possible. With the multitude of individuals and parties involve in such an endeavor, I would expect many more ideas and opinions to come forward. There is a call to fuse efforts in Jefferson with the other performing arts and with a concerted effort, the different arts could support each other in increasing exposure and business opportunities. Music could play a key role in the development of Jefferson’s cultural image and power to draw a quality clientele to their markets. Our schools do a fantastic job at training world class musicians and performers, their difficulties with sustaining a professional career revolves around opportunities to perform. Jefferson itself is a wonderful backdrop for the performing arts could draw a strong patronage from the cities and rural areas of Texas and Louisiana. I would recommend a fund drive to build a small hi-quality theater with seating for two to three hundred people, but the issues for the performing arts belong to others. I do say that with concerted efforts, Jefferson could evolve into a unique city others across the country will want to study and mimic, a town that markets culture and education.

"Michael" by Christian Seidler

This is my opinion about art education in western Europe and the USA:

Higher (and also basic) art education in all of the "western" world has since the fifties lost all its knowledge about serius drawing and painting. Teachers are bad - since they newer learned to draw well themself. Artist "in charge" of the art world do not want competition from artist that knows how to draw and paint well - and since these artists often are "the" teachers at the higer art education programs in college, they do do not want to, and can not, provide the students with good education.

Also - the idea to divide an art education into "classes" (four or five in a semester) with different teachers will never work. A good art education must be based on the traditionel atelier method that worked for Giotto as well as for Bouguereau and many of the Impressionists.

I am very pessimistic that the art colleges and the acrediting systems which guard these colleges are interested in change. Today most atelier schools that can provide a very good education are NOT and may NOT be acredited?!

Check out this website: www.artrenewal.org

I am going to read your message more throughout later and maybe write another message.

Is that site yours? It's wonderful and we'd like them to support us.
Alexei is a lot more advanced at this internet, but I'm trying to find ways to let the world know that we are forming this school and for those who want to learn the art of painting like Alexei and I, we're going to give it to them and college credits too. The reason the State ORCA board decided to back my idea of a school is that they know the schools have failed. The leader in our effort on the board is a past superintendent of schools and knows the system. There are keeping the egg heads off our back and giving us this freedom we need and Panola College is a strong partner. They approached me 5 years ago to form a new art college but they didn't have the stuff to pull it off until we joined forces with the Jeffersonian Institute. The Institute keeps the college from taking us over, giving us the academic freedom we need to do it right.

But damn well said!

second, having gone to art school, at the school of visual arts, i agree with much of what you have to say, but in my experience, there is some credit due to the good instructors that are out there (and they are out there)

the good instructors are differentiated from the bad ones as follows:

they do not play obvious favorites in class, except to point out technical superiority or a "much improved" status of a project. personal aesthetic preference and, most especially, a "kinship" to the work and views of the instructor should not get a student a's.

second, the good instructors do not project their own foibles and the things they love and hate about their own work upon their students' efforts

third, the good instructors are the ones that are eager to have their talented students compete in the same shows that the instructors may be exhibiting in, that is, they take more pride from having instructed a talented artist than fear the competition

fourth, they do not steal their students' graphics (this practice is more rampant, post graduation, than one would think)

fifth, they encourage the student to look outside the school, to recognize the limitations of the program and offer ideas about educational opportunities elsewhere, summers in europe, ateliers, etc.

sixth, they discourage abstraction, mixed media, and general "rushing" until a high competency (at a minimum) in realism (some interpretation ok) is attained.

seventh, they should have real experience in the graphic design, advertising, illustration or other "vocational art job" world even if its maxwell house and comic books, and not just be frustrated soho bitter unrecognized geniuses.

if you can create a school that is staffed by the above, the kimon nicolaides and loomises of today, i am on the first plane there.

thanks
smk