An Approach to Teaching Visual Fine Art to Engineers

Leortardo, Vol. 9, pp. 137-139. Pergamon Press 1976. Printed in Great Britain AN APPROACH TO TEACHING VISUAL FINE ART TO ENGINEERS Paul IF. Miller, Jr.* 1. Introduction This is a report on an elective visual fine art course initiated in 1969 to fourth-year engineeringstudents in the Humanities Department at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey, U.S.A. The course is offered to students as an alternative to courses using written language. That many of the Institute’s engineering students welcome the alternative was demonstrated by their queuing up at four o’clock in the morning to enroll in the course, which is called ‘Principles of Form and Design’, when it was first offered. The purpose of the course is not to train artists, but hopefully, to help students to be more imaginative in their engineering work. The first group was composed of 30 students from the U.S.A., Republic of China, India, Japan, Israel and Egypt. How would I, a sculptor, communicate verbally with these students who came from countries with different languages and, presumably, had not had a lesson in or shown a bent for visual art? I began with the certainty that I would do my best to give them an idea of how some artists go about their work and to let them try with their own hands to make art objects. This would have to be done within 40 hours over a period of three months. 2. Steps in the Course (a) Pictorial art. I decided to introduce the students first to a pictorial style called Abstract Expressionism. This choice was made for several reasons. I was able to explain how this style had affected, for example, high contrast photography and textile designs, how the works of artists might affect the appearance of the urban environment and how this style and the content with which it dealt were related to figurative pictorial art and to aspects of mathematics and physics. Since this school of painting came to be of importance in the U.S.A. * Artist and teacher, Stevens Institute of Technology, Castle Point Station, Hoboken, NJ 07030, U.S.A. (Received 2 May 1975). beginning in the 1930’~~ the students had been surrounded by its influences. Further, I felt that I could speak about the style from first-hand knowledge, having either studied with or personally known the painters Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann. But how was I to break down the inhibitions of those who had not tried to draw or paint a picture since childhood? Once, several years ago when teaching five-year olds, I noticed how they were traumatized by the large sheet of paper that usually was given to them and I cut the sheet into smaller and smaller pieces until I found a size that did not frighten them. I employed this approach again with the students, reasoning that they would not find forbidding a blank 3 x 5 in. filing card. Next I used a trick and thought in terms of the law of averages: A student required to produce 12 calligraphic-like ink and brush paintings on the cards in 15 minutes does not have time to be nervous and out of these one or two might be satisfying to the student and to me (Fig. 1). In this way the students were encouraged to go on to the next steps in the course. Obviously, it was possible to introduce the students to only a few of the media and techniques used in the visual fine arts. A supply of flexible wooden wands, Japanese brushes and bamboo pens was then provided and they were asked to sketch from nature with black and white paints, giving special attention to possible ways of arranging a composition (Fig. 2). To learn about,the various shades of gray, charcoal, chamois and erasers were provided for making a drawing of a model of a still life that I constructed. It was deliberately designed to defy accurate depiction, so that attention was directed to the formal aspect of lines, planes and volumes. It had been instructive for me to watch students when they were introduced to...