SHOWCASING ART I

Every year, Upper School students find many opportunities to engage in artistic exploration and individual expression offered through Trinity Valley’s Fine Arts programming. The broad choices include Choir, Orchestra, Dance, Technical Theater, Stage Acting, Improv, Ceramics, Glass, Photography, Art I, Art II, Art III, and Senior Portfolios. Students who choose to begin their visual art-making adventures with Art I enter a multi-grade-level course that allows them to learn in a studio setting with their peers ranging from freshmen through seniors. This combination provides multi-layered learning as students encounter peers with different levels of technical abilities, experiences, and understandings about art and life. The Art I experience is steeped in the vocabulary of art. Students engage in assignments that help them learn to transform art vocabulary into a visual language that they can recognize as fine art. The projects are wrapped in introductory levels of art history relevant to each area studied throughout the year. Some of those projects are presented in an annual Art I exhibition in the TVS Art Gallery.

This year’s Art I exhibition, presented in January 2023, was comprised of student work from several areas of study and included utilitarian pencil wraps, graphite drawings focused on design and composition, charcoal gesture drawings, pen-and-ink contour line drawings, and watercolor paintings. Each assignment was designed to provide the TVS art student with an introductory foundation of knowledge that will be used in the various Upper School visual arts courses.

Jason Shahi, Graphite on Paper

Brooklyn Weems, Acrylic, Elastic, and Ribbon on Bamboo

In the fall of 2022, Art I students created bamboo pencil wraps to hold and maintain their drawing mediums throughout the year. The interior of each wrap contains woven elastic loops to hold drawing tools, while the exterior is the support for a painting. The paintings are visual expressions of each student’s understanding of several specific design principles that were studied. This project allowed students to visually appreciate the beauty and satisfaction of working with purposeful compositional skills. Students are reminded of their abilities and the significance of design each time they use their pencil wrap in the art studio classroom. As a follow-up to this project, students developed graphite drawings based on the designs they created for their wrap paintings. Comparing the paintings and their respective drawings reveals each student’s growth and appreciation of design, composition, and inventiveness. This assignment provides the opportunity for students to understand and explore the elements and principles of design and to begin preparing for future visual art courses in photography, glass, ceramics, and Art II.

Art I students also learn to develop and advance their drawing skills. They are introduced to the basics of a variety of drawing techniques centered on observational drawing. These important techniques include mass gesture and line gesture, continuous contour line, and contour line drawing methods. Observational drawing is a challenging skill that requires students to stretch their ability to focus and develop an open willingness to see and learn from mistakes. Mistakes are made in the moments of creating. It also provides an immediate opportunity for students to develop and enhance their eye-hand coordination. In the exhibition, there were mass gesture drawings of still-life objects created with charcoal and watercolor paint. These drawings were created in an average of three to five minutes each. Students must quickly learn to scan the objects, looking for formal connections between their observations and their physical arm movement so they can draw with a fluid deliberateness. Line gesture has some similarities to mass gesture, but instead of conveying the breadth and volume of a surface and form, these drawings are trying to convey the contour edges found both inside the objects and on the exterior of the objects. Again, the students worked with various types of charcoal, and the drawings were timed. To draw well using mass and line gesture demands that students draw the general areas, shapes, and forms before focusing on the smaller, more specific details. They are focused on the visual weight of the objects and the relationships between the objects and their details. These drawings are complex and happen so rapidly that students glance only occasionally at their picture plane while drawing. Continuous contour line and contour line drawing are both slower drawing techniques. Students are still working on their eye-hand coordination but at a deliberately slower speed. Students try to convey the details within shapes and forms using clean deliberate lines with singularity and accuracy. In this exhibition, the continuous contour line drawings were created using pen and ink. Pen and ink make the process more challenging because the students cannot erase while making the drawing.

Ruby White, Watercolor on Paper

Gabi Cowan, Graphite on Paper

Hardie Tucker, Watercolor on Paper

Art I students also exhibited watercolor paintings. They each created observational contour line drawings using the techniques of sighting, measuring, and mapping. These processes are complicated and challenging to combine but can result in very beautiful and skillful drawings that became the compositional foundations for their watercolor paintings. This project allows students to slow down and practice looking. It encourages them to become experts in questioning how they see objects in relationship to other objects and space. While the watercolor paintings in this exhibition were based on observational contour line drawings, the process of painting gave way to the investigation of color theory. They learned about different color schemes, selected one, and worked through the development of that scheme. The resulting paintings are the culmination of increasing technical skills, trial and error, growth, perseverance, and inventiveness.

Art I is an opportunity for students to develop different levels of proficiencies in the fundamentals of artmaking, design, and composition. The Art I exhibition this year provided a window into the overlapping projects and learning that prepares students for the challenges of future visual art classes in addition to enriching their daily observations and problem-solving abilities.

Thomas Young, Watercolor on Paper

Tappan Bailey, Pen on Paper

Nori Hamilton, Watercolor on Paper

Dahlia Roberts, Graphite on Paper

Fiona She, Graphite on Paper

Ryan Crider, Acrylic and Elastic on Bamboo

Claire Kauffman, Pen on Paper

Emily Buhman, Watercolor on Paper