Love your art.

Know it.  Love it. Do it.  Love your art.  Just a reminder I drew up quickly last week on the white marker board in my Basic Design class after having graded +80 projects and seeing poor, poor efforts on behalf of my students.  (Less than 10% had well done works)  The skills of design and art, I am certain, lie dormant within them ready to be awoken and exercised - but what also lay dormant are the skills of following instructions and presenting a clean, well-prepared piece of work.

As you can see in the upper right hand corner, I had translated 'clean' and 'messy' into Korean to discuss with my students my expectations for their work.  I remember my first year classes when I went through school, I felt compelled to present the best that I could offer in the variables of time and talent I had available.  Most of my students had procrastinated and gave me disappointing pieces.  It is my job not only to lead them in instruction, but coach them to give their heart in what they do.  If they can put their love and care into what their minds and hands do, they will have done well.  As their professor in this Basic Design class, these core basic values of best effort and personal care is what Basic Design is really about.  In my eyes, these are more important than the basic design theories themselves.

Students had been working on demonstrating creative designs utilizing basic geometry in the form of a point, line or plane, while simultaneously composing constructions of balance in symmetry and asymmetry.  The white board scribbles above show my explanations of point, line, plane, with introductions into texture, and positive versus negative colored fields, as well as, object/shape cropping.  The pizza slice on the right side was to encourage laughter in class as I suggested combining points and lines and planes as 'combo' because they are familiar with this English word being linked to ordering pizza.

I love my students, and I love to teach them something about art.  I hope they will learn to love this for themselves, too, and be the ones who develop something useful, or pass it on to the next generation.