An art teacher discovers Andover Academy’s revolutionary Visual Language curriculum, shifting art education from creative expression to the systematic study of composition, color theory, and visual literacy.
From Life and Art, by Alden Mellor Heck
The second year of upper school art was trial by fire. Big budget, lots of space, big mess. I was still cleaning up from Jayne, and knew things had to change. We found out about a week-long private school art teacher’s workshop at Andover Academy, during the coldest part of January. At Andover I discovered a way of teaching art that was logical. They had a well-conceived program that methodically covered art theory and practices.
The workshop was run by three—how do I describe them?—well, egocentric males who’d gone to Cooper Union or to Pratt. All were practicing artists and self-promoting. Nonetheless they were master teachers running a program rivaling any college department, given the amount of space and materials and books they had. Andover’s art program was overwhelming.
They had a brilliant 9th through 12th curriculum. The 9th grade curriculum—required for every student at Andover—was called Visual Language and parsed the visual world. It was intellectual, appropriate for Andover students. This approach had nothing to do with a child’s skills as an artist. It was a course on how to observe, dissect, understand, and critique what you are
looking at.
The Visual Language curriculum had a whole unit on composition, presented in rational sequence, starting with the picture plane. A picture plane is the geometrical plane of a painting’s surface—the transparent plane of division between the fictive internal space inside a painting and the non-fictive or “real” space outside the frame in which the viewer exists. A picture plane contains positives and negatives, whether realistic or abstract, that move your eye around. You may have a large shape, three middle size shapes, and six small shapes, for example, that create scale variety. You have horizontals, you have verticals, you have diagonals, you have the arabesque (the line that dances). These elements, each with a different energy, can be organized in an infinite number of ways.
So we spent a day moving different shapes and lines around on a plane. We talked about the horizontal picture plane, the vertical picture plane, the square picture plane. The picture plane itself tells you: a horizontal plane is for landscapes, a vertical plane is for figures, and a square plane is for abstractions. Freshman art school material, but for entering high school students it was compelling
The picture plane was just one unit. Another unit was on color. They had a set of notebooks handmade by Josef Albers, the great color theorist. He mixed colors to his own specifications and silk-screened them. So this was not something printed where the value and the hue get skewed because of the printing process. These were actual silk-screens. They had four volumes of Albers silk-screened colors, completely explaining his color theory. The 10” x 16” silk-bound volumes were out on the table where you could look at them, touch them, and open them to gaze upon Albers’ original colors.
From the Albers books we learned about the ‘value’ of color. Our brains see value before color, but we only have a vocabulary for color. To learn how to define values, you’d get a little jar of white paint, a little jar of black paint, and create a value scale of 20 values, where every step was the same increment as the last one. You went from white on one end to black on the other, and you had to mix a value scale.
What I learned from that, which I also learned from Bob Kulicke a decade later, is that value is what creates visual structure, not color. Color is the poetry you build upon a structure of values. When you look at a full color painting, to evaluate the value of a green, for example, you need to become a black and white camera. You learn to screen out hue in order to see value. Seeing values, you perceive a structure that color alone can never create. They taught us how to observe the amount of light bouncing off the surface and hitting your retina, to see if two colors are equal or different in value. If you squint where they touch, it’s a smooth edge. Black-to-white makes a dramatic edge. Lilac-to-lavender makes a smooth edge.
Then we go into the theory of how advertisers get your attention. First, in black, white and gray-scale. Then in color. The color that gets to your optical cortex fastest turns out to be yellow-green. They’ve measured it. That’s why tennis balls are yellow green.
Then a unit on perspective, on and on. The art curriculum at Andover is largely the same today. Andover describes the curriculum on its website:
Visual Studies focuses on artistic thinking, visual vocabulary, visual literacy, and the relationship of making and thinking. Why do humans create? And how? Projects, discussions, and visits to the Addison Gallery of American Art and Peabody Institute of Archaeology focus students on their own creative work and what they perceive in the world around them. Students use a range of media (such as drawing, collage, photography, video, or clay) to expand their perceptual, conceptual, and technical skills, and develop the visual language needed to communicate their experiences and ideas.
The Andover curriculum had a lot of science. It was a rational break-down of the elements of art. This pre-dated Photoshop but predicted is visual categorization. Meanwhile, back at GFS, students were being taught, “This is magic. Oh, you just do it. Be creative! Oh, look what happened. Oh, that’s interesting. How does it make you feel? What do you want to do next?” That was the curriculum, acceptable perhaps for early grades, but not challenging enough to engage teenagers. At Andover I found a way to think about art. I saw how to create a rational and logical movement from 9th grade art through to 12th grade art. Now I knew what the components would be.
