Most importantly, I'm not a Western major, I'm a minor. If explaining your future degree to people feels uncomfortable, no worries, it can get just a little weirder. Really, I'm a painting and printmaking major, with the School of Fine Arts. I joined Western with their first LLC, Activism and Engaged Learning. After deciding that my ideal art-with-everything-else degree would have been a six year journey, I chose my current path, which keeps things in check.
So anyway, an art major, interdisciplinary studies minor goes to Italy. I'm doing a semester in Florence, with Studio Art Centers International (SACI), an English-speaking program, because suck it Italian. With three studio art courses and two art history courses, I'm basically enrolled everything I would take normally this time back home. They are:
Advanced Drawing - Upper level art courses have you creating self-designed projects and approaching conceptualization. We have to justify our work with meaning, rather than simply draw attractive still lifes (I hate you, still lifes). As a supplement to our drawing, we're reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. We consider themes from that story and use them to construct drawings based on those concepts. Drawing works as both a visual exercise (for preparatory work, warm-ups, etc.) and an art in it's own right. I use just about any medium here, with lots of charcoal and ink.
Intermediate Painting - Like my drawing course, intermediate painting has us moving away from very technical projects (those still lifes...) into more conceptual work. Since this is an intermediate class we don't have total freedom; each project has a framework to work within. I mostly use oil paint here.
Beginning Serigraphy - Serigraphy is just silk screening, or screen printing, however you prefer. That's how you print t-shirts. Because it's an intro course, and because of the professor's teaching style, this is the simplest class I'm taking. We learn the process and have fun. That's it really.
Women in the Arts in Italy - The class that exercises my flabby reading and writing skills. My required reading (and my supplemental and 'suggested' reading) is as much as I've read in all of my time at Miami, seriously. Art history can be like that I guess. We examine women as both subjects of art and as artists themselves around the time of the Renaissance.
Contemporary European and Italian Art - There are three articles we have to read in this class about art in the modern era, each about critical issues that have affected the art world. Every day we review and analyze modern artists and place them in the context of these issues.
Since this is for Western, I'll explain how I make all this relevant to the program, or rather, how I make the program relevant to my major. The courses I take for the minor are mostly the same WST-labelled classes that majors take. Just as individualized majors are expected to use the skills gained in those classes to pursue their degree, I am expected the same without the guidance of the major. For me, the research and writing projects performed in Western courses have been an influence on the way I study art and artists. I now think of artists not as people with miraculous talent and sudden inspirations, but creatives who are highly analytical. I use the same research skills to consider my own art, and explain better to others why did what I did. I use these skills to make better art by always questioning my reasons for making it. For me, what I apply from Western, at home and abroad, is the need to avoid lazy thinking and to the practice of being self-critical.
That's all, I'll go back to posting pictures of Italy.
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