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AP Studio Art is offered along with Art 12 and Advanced Art 12. The core structure of this course runs through all three programs. The unique requirements of AP Studio Art Drawing and AP Studio Art Design are accommodated through this core structure, though each student will be responsible for ensuring that art works are made, documented, and chronicled according to their respective AP Studio course requirements.
AP Studio Art students will create a three part portfolio that sorted along works of Quality, Area of Concentration, and Breadth. The Quality section (Section I) permits the student to select the works that best exhibit a synthesis of form, technique, and content. Each of the portfolios asks the student to demonstrate a depth of investigation and process of discovery through the Concentration section (Section II). In the Breadth section (Section III), the student is asked to demonstrate a serious grounding in visual principles and material techniques.
Students will not experience the course in a sequence that naturally reflects the three AP sections. Rather, these three components of the AP Portfolio will be addressed simultaneously throughout the course.
Units Of Study:
Yearlong Journal/Sketchbook
Throughout the course, students maintain an 11 x 14” sketchbook. In which, students keep ideas, observational studies, preparatory or planning sketches for larger works., media experiments, notes, some research on particular artists, etc. This book is to be filled with work by the courses end. For AP students, there may the occasional work in this book that meet the criteria of the AP exam and therefore should be documented in slide form.
TERM 1
Unit 1: Drawing foundations: Looking and noticing
In this unit, students will make a series of works, some as quick studies, others more in depth. With the emphasis in looking and noticing, students will do exercises that encourage critical observation (e.g.: gesture and responsive line drawing). To go more in depth in this objective, students are asked to Select an organic object which embodies visual or physical properties of sequence, rhythm, advancing and recessional space, harmonic colour, proportion, etc. Create four drawings of this subject, each drawing will attempt to focus on a different fact of the subject and each one will be done in a different medium or mode of expression.
The critique that follows the artwork explores how students interested the task. What organic objects have the properties of sequence, rhythm, advancing and recessional space, etc? How were these forms interpreted? What media best enabled exploration of these various facets of the subject?
Unit 2: Lighting / Drama / Value
In this unit, students do some studies of works in dramatic light, each playing with a different media or treatment such as charcoal, agitated line, refined rendering, etc. Subsequently, students will establish their own still life or subject and render it in dramatic light. The subsequent critique explores how lighting impacts the message offered by the work. We discuss the relationship between rendering quality, gesture, value intensity, composition and meaning.
Skills & awareness
• Attention to observed forms
• Confidence in trusting the eye
• Variety of gestural representations
• Range of media explored
• Seeing dynamism in otherwise banal subjects
• Compositional potential and impact
Unit 3: Quality in Observation
In this unit, students explore the portrait. Drawing from life into the sketchbook students create studies of themselves and their peers. We look at the organization of the face according to its bone structure. Create a representational self-portrait. Historically, we explore the French Academy prescriptive treatments of the portrait and the figure. Students are urged to consider such criteria in the exploration of their final portrait which is to be a large scale observational study, preferably with the figure in a context.
Skills & awareness
• Patient observation & trusting the eye
• Controlling proportion and value
• Drawing an egg through hatching to describe forms in the round that flow and how to render a figure on ground.
• Drawing the self portrait to enhance patient observation, understanding fluidity of form, controlling proportion
• Consider and explore meaning derived from the figure’s gaze, treatment, context and expression.
• Compositional potential and impact
 Unit 4:Conceptual exploration
Students create an artwork that is, or is in service of, a ritual of personal significance. This artwork can be based on a ritual that is overtly or covertly significant. Obsessive behavioural patterns such as what might be for some clipping toenails may be as significant to some as the first Holy Communion is to others. It is the student’s task to establish this significance. The student should also explore all of the aspects suggested by the word RITUAL (e.g. routine, time, cronology, spiritual, etc..) These elements should be evident in our work if it is to truly read as a significant ritual. Explore media and a scale that BEST brings us to your ritual.
by Christine teBogt AP ART 12
Skills & awareness
• Constructing a thematic based scene or method of documentation, preparing students for a concentration body
• A process of thematic ideation
• Issues around perceptual values, cultural appropriation, the banal and the political.
• Moving beyond rendering forms and further developing student strengths in combining visual articulation skills towards making more complex drawings.
Pervasive through all units: Art History
This occurs as a thread throughout the course to bring students up to speed on the key aspects of the art discourse. Semester 1 surveys the connections from Ancient Greece to Impressionism – and explores the connections between the given culture, the art and the institutional and technological paradigm of the day.
Skills & awareness
• to gain experience and understanding of a long standing and rich art discourse
• to be knowledgeable about the players, ideas, and movements in our shared cultural past
• to recognize and value the creative contributions of numerous cultural players
• to critically observe, interpret and respond to a range of visual artifacts.
TERM 2
Concentration Probes & Proposal
Term 2 is designed for students to work independently on their area of concentration portfolio. To these ends, students construct their concentrated body of work around three main artworks. They will also develop a proposal that will outline a rationale for the creation of their body of artworks. These works should grow from personal drives or interest.
In their proposal students are asked to articulate their area of concentration as statements, even though an area of concentration is really a response to question around the exploration of a particular theme, phenomenon or media.
This statement needs to articulate:
• the conceptual framework, theme or subject matter. What ideas do you want to explore?
• the materials the student plans to employ or investigate.
• also, provide a rationale for the decisions.
• Ideally, also include references to two artists that can inform the creative pursuit
• include a possible thumbnail for each work.
Art History & Modern to Contemporary influential discourse.
In Semester 2, the research is focused around a Modern to contemporary artist or movement that particularly informs the student’s area of concentration. This aims to help students participate in the visual conversation that has preceded the student’s presence in the discourse. Students will do research, and teach peers about a select contemporary artist who’s art work informs their own. Students will also do an artwork that is directly informed by their researched artist’s body of work.
The academic components of this unit will be done after AP portfolios are submitted in for AP assessment in May.
Preparing the Portfolio
Shooting slides: prior to the AP deadline, there will be a session offered on how to photographically document art work and another on mounting artwork. Images need to be properly cropped and transferred to slides. |
