Art Foundation

At VCU, if you are going into art school for fine arts than you have to go through a program called art foundation, commonly reffered to as AFO. AFO is bassically just an art students freshman year, where the student explores all of the componets of art. These include time, surface, space and drawing. These are all studio classes. At first when I was signing up for these classes, I was like, "what the hell? How can a class be called 'time'? What do they mean by surface?". But now, I totally get it. The labels are just really enticing.

Time Studio deals with everything "time based". In other words, it deals with stuff like film, video, photo, animations and excettera.

Surface Studio teaches the student about two dimensional art. It covers color, texture, visual orginization and other stuff like that.

Drawing Studio is exactly like it sounds. A studio where you draw. This studio is different from the other studio's because it isn't ambiguious. You can't really use your imagination to make stuff. You just draw what you see. Draw, draw, draw, draw, draw. This is very important though. Drawing teaches you lots of things.

Space Studio is space oriented. From what I gather, it is almost like sculpture. The student learns about space through different three dimensional media. Of course the student still has to think about organizaion and aesthetics and things of that nature.

Other required courses for AFO students that are not studio classes are Art History, Focused Inquiry, and a Project class of choice.

Art History is the study of the evolution of Art. This study dates from Prehistoric times to the present. This is a wide range. That is a lot of years and a lot of Art to take in all in two semesters!

Focused Inquiry is a class that I mostly relate to as an English class. In class, there are discussions about current events and things going on around the world, and then we write about our opinions on things. It is kinda a mix of sociology and English and maybe a little bit of philosophy.

Project classes are where you get to pick a major to explore without majoring in it yet. You get to pick a major and see what it is all about for five weeks. The five week thing is good and bad.

So, this semester I am taking Art Education as my project class, Focused Inquiry, Art History, Drawing Studio and Time Studio.