How to Draw by Seeing Differently
CFA’s Visual Arts Summer Institute offers high schoolers an intensive program in painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking
How to Draw by Seeing Differently
How to Draw by Seeing Differently
Each year, high school students from around the country (and even farther afield) come to BU to attend the College of Fine Arts Visual Arts Summer Institute (VASI), an intensive four-week program modeled on the foundation courses all BU School of Visual Arts BFA degree students take. In addition to classes in drawing, painting, sculpture, and printmaking, they also talk about a wide range of topics with faculty and staff—and each other—like the college admissions process and contemporary issues in the arts; attend workshops (among recent subjects: sketchbooks, watercolor, perspective, and color theory); and go on field trips to local exhibitions—this year they visited the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Peabody Essex Museum, and an immersive exhibition on Frida Kahlo.
VASI students are assigned their own studios, where they can work on class assignments as well as work of their own choosing. At the end of the program, faculty and staff, along with guest critics, tour the studios and offer individual critiques of each student’s art. The program concludes with an exhibition of the students’ art in CFA’s Gallery 5.
In the video above, Sam Guy (CFA’19), a VASI drawing instructor, talks about the program, what it takes to produce a good drawing, and why he finds teaching high school students so invigorating.
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