Blog #17

Develop an idea for a visual art field study. Where would you take the students, why would this be an important place to take them? What standards would the trip address? What is it that they are getting here that they can’t get in the classroom environment? Expand upon or address anything else you think is important.

A thought could be that for High School students that are working on a portrait design is taken on a tour to the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston South Carolina. The tour can cover history as far as some standards goes. Here is a brief description of their permanent exhibit This place is important for a couple of reasons. The students may not realize that they live in a state full of history. Good and Bad history but history none the less. The arts flourish down in Charleston and the over all location from a colony well on passed the civil war has plenty of art to tell what went on.

-Portraiture was the principal art form of colonial South Carolina. Though Europen immigrants willingly left families and possessions to come to the New World in hopes of a better life, they carried with them their European artistic ideals. As colonial America did not yet have an established artistic tradition, artists and sitters continued to look to Europe, and England in particular, to define the most desirable qualities of taste and refinement. ( Gibbesmuseum.org)

The permanent collection at the Gibbes contains work by artists who came to the colony with artistic skills gained in Europe, such as portrait artists Jeremiah Theus, John Wollaston and Henrietta Johnston, who is recognized as the first woman artist in America. Frequent and continued travel to Europe for education and business provided Charlestonians the opportunity for numerous portrait commissions by well-known artists working abroad, such as William Keable and Benjamin West.
(Gibbesmuseum.org)

This would be an important place to take them it's history and to ask them what skills do they think they have gained coming from a prior art class or from an old town that they left. The questions that I would ask and have them think are things like, where did your skills from come? Do you think they are hereditary and are passed down by a known artists in your family? Or do you believe you are the first of your family to embark down an artistic road? The study of self portraits at the museum could then be broken down into how they would make their own self portraits in the classroom. If this was a painting II course then I would require them to study the use in lighting and pigments. Assignment could then be paint a self portrait best derived from the works at the museum using oil paints.

What they are getting out of the trip if we are to go there is one the restless students can see the world of art outside their classroom. 2, there are limits to just Googling an image from any time period, A printed image on computer paper stuffed in a kids book bag is never a true experience than to take a break from a classroom's four walls to see paintings in person.