Student Responses - Art Critique

Artwork credits

Painter and Wellesley College Professor of Art Bunny Harvey joined the Vision & Art class for a life drawing session and an art critique. Above are some samples of student work, and below, several students reflect on the exercise:

"I think that Bunny’s critique was very interesting, especially because I have never taken a painting or drawing class before. What I found specifically informative was how she viewed our drawings. Her lack of emphasis on details such as mouths, fingernails, belly buttons, and the like, was particularly of interest. I like such older works from the High Rennaisance as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. The details are what draw me to a painting and the elaborate use of colors. However, hearing her speak of the way in which the drawings drew her in...I began to appreciate her view of art in a ‘less is more’ approach that prior to her talk I had never paid much attention."

- Al Cathel '09

"Bunny broached many subjects that were directly relevant to our Vision and Art coursework. She mentioned how we, as artists, need to separate ourselves from thinking too much about what we are producing. She told us that people tend to focus on prior knowledge and named parts instead of just translating what they see. For example, beginning artists have the tendency to draw noses the same way regardless of how the nose of the model actually looks. They let their prior knowledge of what a nose should look like interfere with what they are actually seeing. Bunny also instructed us to free ourselves from our “writer’s grip of the pencil” as well as our tendency to outline. She discussed how important the implicit movement and weight of the figure is and she told us that we need to be connected to the image as a whole and not simply to individual pieces. I think the most valuable aspect of this critique was that it allowed us to approach the neuroscience of art from a different perspective. So far we have only really experienced the view of ‘the neuroscientist looking at art,’ so seeing the ‘artist looking at art’ was a new and rather exciting viewpoint."

- Colleen Kirkhart '09

"A specific set of muscles, mostly in our fingers, has been trained to make the kinds of marks necessary for writing script. That training is akin to a basketball player training himself to shoot a free throw. He does it over and over and over until he forms a muscle memory for the motion. He can step up to the line and shoot the ball without much conscious thought and analysis of where his hands should be and how his arms should unfold. He just does it. We have muscle memory for all sorts of activities. Bunny pointed out the importance of recognizing that this is the case for our hands, and that there exist oodles of muscle combinations from your fingers to your wrist, up your arm and into your shoulder, that can yield different kinds of marks. Liberating yourself of your trained mark making widens and deepens your vocabulary of line. This liberation is not easy. Sometimes someone needs to tell you to step back and draw from your shoulder because you will not do this intuitively. If you are really stubborn, an instructor may need to hand you a long twig and ask you to draw with that. The so-called action painters, like Jackson Pollock, put their entire body into the process of image making, sometimes suspending themselves above their canvases, allowing their most basic gestural crux to dictate how the pigment gets put down on the canvas. I never paint sitting down."

- Rosa Lafer-Sousa '09

art credits