Sixth floor, room 603, this is where my morning starts. Early mornings never worked that well for me, well unless it involves sleeping in. Room 603 is my foundations class, where I will have to establish myself as an artist through clusters of fundamental art theory and practice. Nobody likes re-learning the basics, especially at an art college, were all obsessed with how we are way (wayyyyyy) passed that. Before the semester began, we were told to forget everything we were taught in high school art; fortunate for me, I never paid much attention to my art classes. Something made the class way too formal for learning, art that is.
How can you teach someone to be a good artist? You can’t. You can teach people how to draw good lines and good circles, even great lines and circles, but lines and circles don’t make art. Just like letters and punctuations don’t make a poem. That’s what the entire art department symbolizes to me, that you can teach us all of the technique in the world, and we can still manage to turn it into crap and that too, is art, if we say it is. The sixth floor’s walls display student artwork from classes regularly. It feeds us, the students, inspiration. Good art or bad art, its still food; just like how writers progress from reading and writing, visual artists progress by looking and drawing, which in my opinion, is far easier than what writers have to do.
When I first came to Cornish, one of my biggest hesitations about the school was the “artsy-ness” factor. Yes, it’s a real word; it means, “to be self-consciously artistic.” Its fine to be artsy in high school, there are maybe a handful of students who claim themselves as artists. But now take those students and multiply them by one hundred. Scary right? Okay maybe not scary, but weird, really weird. I consider myself a pretty normal kid in my world; okay so not normal, but average. See where I’m going here? Artists are like the black sheep at school; we stand out in a crowd of white sheep. But Cornish is like the black sheep pasture; taking all of the black sheep from the field and sticking them together in one building. I was worried at first; I don’t like to represent myself as an artist, especially not a conceptual one. I’ve never been the most social type, but I do know I’m getting there.
The willingness to unite under a bond of what we share as common interests connects the student body at Cornish and perhaps our major may be the only thing we have in common. This is the design floor, this is where the design students play and over at Kerry Hall, that’s where the music and dance students play. “You dance? That’s cool, I do art.” I haven’t been enrolled long enough to experience the collaborations between the other departments, so I don’t know what’s going on with the other students. I’m a freshman; it’s supposed to be like that, well in high school at least.
