Artists View Objects in a New Light

“I thought learning to draw would help improve my sketches for engineering as well as increase my creativity,” she said. 

The class, led by upper school visual arts teacher Luke Wilde, is an introduction to the art-making processes within drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture. “This is an opportunity for students to begin to explore their artistic voice and start to understand the language used to convey their ideas, both verbally and visually,” Wilde said.

Wilde kicked off the first part of the class’ Drawing From Abstraction project by taking the artists outside to work with charcoal on paper.

“We start the project with two drawings from observation,” Wilde said. “A display of simple 3D objects is set up for them to draw, trying to capture the values we see based on the way the light is hitting the objects. The students are challenged to understand how light affects what they are seeing. The first drawings were lit by the sun and the second ones were lit by light sources in the art studio.”

Loewy Nalle ’27 enjoyed working en plein air. “I found it relaxing to sit outside with my friends and draw,” she shared. “I'm not even the best artist, but I still took time with my work and made it the best I could.”

The next part of the project was to combine and abstract the two drawings. “The point of this is to make the new abstracted shapes in the composition appear to be 3D forms,” Wilde explained. “The students cut their drawings into equal parts and then combined those sections to make one large drawing. Then they must go back into the drawing with charcoal to match the values between each section.”

While Nalle found the last part of the project somewhat challenging, she said, “It is refreshing to come to this class after all my academic classes because it is very calming.”

At the project’s end, Wilde looks forward to when students are asked to share feedback. “It is great to see the culmination of the hours of work they put into these drawings and to see their peers' interpretations,” he shared. “It helps them to reflect on their own work and they get to practice talking about other people's art in a thoughtful and constructive way.”