Design 101

The summer between my first and second year of college, after I had moved from the slab dorm into the co-op house, I took an art class. That is, an Art class, in the Art Department of the UW, the first Design prerequisite class for all the other art classes. Nearly every day I walked up and down State Street to the bunkerlike Humanities Building and went upstairs to a cement classroom without windows. Often it was open so the students could work there on our projects, which was good because my room at the co-op was too small for a desk, although sometimes I worked there on the floor.

The teacher gave us a list of acrylic paints to buy, the primary colors to mix others from, yellow red and blue, with white and black, and then also a tube of purple, because, he explained, you will see it is hard to mix a good purple from red and blue. That was a mystery. It was true, and it still is, although I have since learned that is because the particular red and blue he had us buy do not make as vivid a secondary as certain other reds or blues. We mixed color wheels, or something like that, as we had mostly been doing in primary school art classes with cheap seven-pan boxes of watercolor. We made some geometric designs with related shades of a single color. I painted a very gray impressionistic landscape of the willows overhanging Lake Mendota from the rocks, maybe with ducks; it was so bad I destroyed it soon after. I made a number of collages that I still have.

Collage on purple box

It was not a Drawing class, and as I recall we didn’t do any drawing. Not a painting class either, really, and we didn’t use watercolors or oils or pastels. I’m thinking over all these things because of the reading I’ve done recently on art curricula of the last few centuries, and where my training fits in. My previous art classes had been the kind where the art teacher comes around to the classroom once a week, and tries to get everyone to exhibit their innate genius in the format of some medium and project she has already worked out in detail: crayon drawings with resist, linoleum block printing, papier mache masks, macramé hangings. I had spent one month in a high school art class trying to draw in pencil a still life that seemed to me entirely dead, and the teacher never satisfied with what I had done. But mostly I had avoided art classes because, I thought, I was not enough of an artist.

I guess I took that summer class to test this assumption, as a sort of lark. As larkishness goes it was not much fun. For our final projects I had a fairly weak collage, because I was resisting the part of the lesson where you abandon the original content of the photo or object, and was composing surrealist pastiche from the work of professional photographers and advertising designers. One girl in our class was going to be an Artist, though. I could tell because she had made a large soft sculpture out of dozens of gloves.