Art and Design (Fine Art)

Course summary

The Art course at WQE is a traditional painting and drawing course. It’s important that you enjoy drawing and are prepared to develop your abilities by practice and experimentation, as good drawing is the single most important thing you can learn at this stage. You will learn how to build up a painting from the initial idea to a finished product. Relating our work to that of other artists is an important part of our study and time is spent analyzing and writing about pictures that are relevant to what we are doing. By finding out what sorts of things artists paint, we can make our own work belong to a long tradition of painting, and yet be up to date at the same time. Students are encouraged to work towards producing ambitious final pieces which are mounted for display. It’s really important to learn the basic language of drawing and painting, and we spend a lot of time learning how to get things in the right places when we draw, how to use shading effectively, how to use a variety of materials, and what we can do with color. As we go along, we encourage you to use each new thing that you learn in a piece of your own, so that you are developing your own artistic personality. The most important thing to realize is that success in the course is directly dependent on the amount of time you spend on your work. Drawing and painting are difficult and must be practiced if you are to develop the confidence to make your own valid artistic statements. Students build a portfolio as they record their ideas and explore new drawing approaches. Most lessons are practical, where you are drawing or painting, but there are critical studies lessons and ‘crits’, where you show your work to the rest of the group. We are keen to make connections between the paintings of the past and contemporary work, especially in the second year. Component One, in the second year, contains a written study, where students explore a topic that has interested them in their own work by researching the work of artists with similar ideas.