Topos Books

1st edition: January 2008

This book raises some fundamental and unresolved issues in the field of the teaching of the visual arts. It attempts to highlight the approach that suggests visual arts education is essentially rooted in the bringing together of artistic stimulation with teaching. The real challenge the arts teacher faces is creating those conditions that are conducive to artistic activity while imbuing this instruction with an element of revelation, thus linking artistic experience with learning about the arts and the meaning of the artistic.
It is a creative and thoughtful quest that doesn’t succumb to a convention-drive logic and cannot be categorized. If this process becomes completely entrenched, if it’s to some degree shaped, then it loses a large part of its essence. The multiplicity of the approaches and perspectives are intrinsic characteristic of the artistic phenomenon and, consequently, determine the tone of any instruction.
According to this rationale, the teaching of the visual arts is incompatible with a prescribed approach to design and application of activities. It’s a position in flux in which each action is part of the whole of the artistic act, aiming at a global and cohesive perception of art.
This concern is at the book’s center. This axis effectively highlights the stimuli and parameters of creation in the visual arts and, by extension, its instruction. It doesn’t present a closed model but paints a field that’s open to choices and different paths.
This approach aims at helping the educator organize his thoughts around the subject he is called on to teach. It also aims to contribute to the broader discussion of the issue, to the emergence of an analytical approach to it. The point, then, is not to highlight one approach as the sole, unquestionable choice but to seek the conditions that recognize many practices and perspectives as segments of learning about art in the present and the past, while also positing an open, probing and critical examination of it.