in the visual arts; they address drawing, painting, sculpture and digital imaging. The same schedule in performing arts applies during the alternate semester. “Our introduction to sculpture, for instance, is presenting material and a problem. While students work through the making and doing, I talk through design principles and offer relevant context and history,” Ian says. In one session last fall, students’ “materials” were marshmallows and dry spaghetti. Using these, they were to construct the largest sculpture they could that would survive the trip back to dorm or to home, intact. They worked “in the tradition of Buckminster Fuller (Milton Class of 1913) and his geodesic dome,” Ian says. These sculptures served as maquettes for the design challenge in the next class: working as a group, with only two Sunday-newspaper’s worth of newsprint and one roll of masking tape, to build as tall a tower as possible, strong enough to hold the weight of a teddy bear at the top. “In the Class IV program, we’re not necessarily after a certain finished product— we’re more interested in the process. I put a creative problem before the students. If there are 12 people in the class, I want 12 different responses.” This approach is pedagogically on target for freshmen, Ian thinks. After this broad exposure, students begin to understand the possibilities of different art disciplines and get excited about focusing on an area for a full-year course. (Milton requires at least one full-year course in the arts.)
In successive courses, Class III and beyond, students narrow their focus and intensively develop certain skills crucial to a particular art discipline. In a typical class that meets several times a week, students and their faculty can be more deliberate and formal about developing extended projects. “Students also see how what they’re doing in art intersects with all the subject areas they’re studying,” Ian points out. “Working to develop one visual concept over the course of a semester—pushing one big idea as far as it can go—is an important experience for young people, especially when they hit the wall and have to push through it,” Ian says. Advancing his own work and his technique in oil painting led Ian from what he calls “fairly traditional, realistic landscape painting” to “more abstract, atmospheric works.” His current work, for instance, focuses on the ambiguity found at the horizon. Texture and the relief of the surface is important now. He uses a palette knife almost exclusively to deliver the paint and focuses on how the mark affects the surface of the painting. Art is always about problem solving, and for Ian the genesis of an idea is often a small plein-air study (12" x 12") that he translates into a much larger composition. Executing the difference in scale presents many challenges, especially as his technique requires him to work on a wet surface. “The sculptural possibilities inherent in the slow-drying attributes of oil paint are integral to my work,” he says, “and the medium really leads the process.” Spring 2013 33