This program is for students eager to advance their drawing abilities and deepen their own sense of place in the history of art and image making. In regular drawing studios each week, we will address skills and expression through representational drawing, life drawing, spatial studies, iterative studies and non-representative abstraction, using a variety of old and new tools and media, from vine charcoal to digital collage. Students will be called on to develop a regular drawing practice outside the studio as well and to take on a substantive drawing project for a final exhibition. 

In lecture/workshops and seminars, we will use drawing as a connecting reference across time and cultures to study history and ideas of art and image making. We will consider how forms, methods and meanings appear, transform and reappear, from cave drawings, alphabets and portraiture to graffiti, maps and the mediations of technology. Students will be asked to do a research project exploring the relationship of drawing and art history to another discipline and to present their findings to their peers. Book possibilities include Lines: A Brief History (Ingold), The Life of Forms in Art (Focillon), Thinking with Things (Pasztory), Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective (Scolari) and Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (Dexter).

Engaged students will develop a stronger drawing practice, new ideas, a fuller sense of their work in historical and cultural contexts and skill in connecting art making and art history to other disciplines, informing and enriching all three.