follow her heart. Nowadays Kelly isn’t delivering the news or parlaying funds but she is working as a product development manager in Tiffany and Company’s jewelry division while pursuing an advanced degree at the Gemology Institute in New York. “I wanted something I was passionate about,” Kelly says. “At Deerfield I developed the fundamental tools and skills of an artist. I gained confidence.” Like Kelly’s Deerfield student self, current senior Wyatt Sharpe isn’t planning on a career in the arts either, but he is quick to say that studying them has deepened his understanding across the academic board; art even came into play over the summer, when Sharpe was working toward becoming an emergency medical technician. “Drawing forces you to deconstruct a whole into its parts in order to see how they are constructed, and then build them back up again. When I was earning my EMT certification, I realized how much sketching nudes helped me to learn anatomy; drawing the human body gave me a familiarity with it that I don’t think I could have gotten any other way. You get a sense of weight and heft. You learn to step back and observe. The more angles you look at something from, the better you understand it.” Recently Sharpe has become even more familiar with seeking out multiple angles—but he’s not drawing anything this time around. Wyatt proudly displays his finite element computer models—bright primary colors morph into subtle shades—illustrating trauma, and corollaries, and etiology—decidedly inartistic topics in his Biomedical Research class—but Sharpe is able to demonstrate a parallel: “Drawing, in its most reduced form, is problem solving; scientific research, in its most reduced form, is problem solving.” This past fall, Wyatt’s dedication, in front of both easel and monitor, paid off when the Biomedical Research paper he helped to author was accepted for publication by the Journal of Forensic Sciences (see pages 14 and 15 for a sample of Wyatt’s work).
. . . you don’t expect students to jump into drawing without having laid a foundation for learning, for seeing, and for translating what they observe into something tangible, . . . First you want them to be visually literate.
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