Course Spotlight: Art about Writing; Writing about Art
This is a class that focuses on making connections between multiple creative forms. Students consider imagery as source material for writing, stories as source material for imagery, and then explore the different ways that these can be integrated into the creative process.
I started my career as an arts educator, and for me the relationship between the written and the visual has always been really exciting. This class focuses on hands-on creative activities—first a series of illustrations for Italio Calvino’s Invisible Cities, second a series of creative writing prompts based off children’s books, personal photographs, postcards, and a visit to the Brattleboro Art Museum, followed by a self-portrait project that must integrate written and visual elements through collage or graphic novel formats. Once these projects are completed, students design and execute an independent project that focuses on some element of what they have learned in the course of the term. It is a fun class, and no matter where students are as writers or artists, they complete some excellent work.
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As part of the process, each unit starts with 1-day intro projects that explore specific concepts or materials. With the first unit, students learned how to work with India ink and focused on pen & ink techniques for shading and creating compositions. Students spent class listening to stories from Invisible Cities and drew imagery, responding to what they heard. Next they were able to choose a few stories to read and study to create more finished illustrations. Students learn about the creative process, working from short drawings, then making thumbnail drawings to plan their compositions, and then completing a larger, finished piece.
In the second unit, students explored a range of different ways imagery can be used as a starting point for creative and analytical writing. Students spend the first week completing different creative writing activities to explore different ways to approach narrative story telling. First they worked from a children’s story, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, which includes an illustration and a caption—their task was to complete the story that goes with the picture, either starting or ending with the caption. The next day they worked from a series of their own pictures, first describing the moment of the picture, then describing what lead to the picture, and then what happened after—considering how single moments fit into a sequence of time. For the third prompt, students chose postcards (from a series I have complied) and then were given three pieces of paper, randomly assorted—a person, a place, and a conflict. From the image and the three pieces of information, they completed an 8-minute free write of a fictional story. They completed three of these in the class period. With the writing starts completed of the course of the week, students chose one piece to revise and develop into a finished piece of creative writing. Following this, they visited the Brattleboro Museum of Contemporary Art, and wrote an analytical response to one of the works on display at the museum.
The third assignment focuses on integrating both written and visual elements into a self-portrait. The focus of this unit is to consider how written and visual elements can be combined into a cohesive composition to explore issues of identity and self. Students began with a 1-day lesson in drawing faces, then another on found-imagery collaging, and then a third on story-boarding and graphic novels. Within these techniques, students decide what story or facet of their personality they wanted to focus on and how they wanted to tell a story about something that is central to who they are. Most students chose to work with combined elements of drawing, collage, and hand-written stories.
Once these assignments are complete, students spent the last few weeks of school designing their own project and completing it. They complete a structured proposal for the project, explaining what they will be doing and why they are interested in pursuing their topic. The range of solutions for this assignment consisted of everything from photo collages, to illustrated poems, to direct continuations of previous projects. It is exciting to see what students choose to do with the freedom to choose assignments, and while some are challenged by the openness of the assignment, each is able to figure out the best solution for the assignment considering their interests.
Vermont Academy is a coed college preparatory boarding and day school in southern Vermont, serving grades 9-12 plus a postgraduate year.
