Drawing and Painting in the high school emphasizes visual thinking and doing. We explore many different attitudes and approaches to making art. Traditional studio techniques and media give rise to experimentation. The pedagogy seeks to nurture growth and foster playfulness while imparting skills from the pantheon of historical art making. Many lessons are one-time experiments in a certain direction. Students invent characteristics and then act them out on the picture plane.

One of the most interesting parts of the creative process is the decision of what to do, what direction to take, or which attitude to explore. The actual crafting, time consuming and laborious, can be rewarding as well, but weíd rather have much of our students class time engaged in many different experiences; causing those neural networks to form which involve creative problem solving and invention. An example of this is our miniature painting project in which we try to create as many tiny compositions of paint as possible in one studio session. In doing this, the studentís inventiveness begins to really flow. In our debriefing sessions afterwards we talk about why we like some of our messes better than others. We begin to develop a more discerning eye, and how to use language to describe visual phenomena.

We emphasize perceptual drawing, hand/eye/ heart coordination, and engage in many ways to improve seeing the world in fresh ways. I see my job as, at least in good measure, to get those eyelids wider again, like they were when they were discovering the world the first time.

Simple phenomena can become really extraordinary when we stop to really examine them. Teenagers are hungry for discovery, despite the pose of knowing it all. The program hopes to point them to safe as well as exciting universes where they can learn about risk taking, and discovering some hidden potential.