Course Overview
Within the three transcendentals, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, the fine arts are situated primarily under Beauty.
The fine arts are viewed as an essential human
experience, as a key part of the liberal arts. They are to be taught in a way that is experiential and not professional: all are to participate in the fine arts, not just the professional.
At Great Hearts, we study fine arts to experience beauty; as a way to participate in beauty. We help students both create and encounter beauty by teaching the
requisite skills of the discipline and pointing students to the aesthetic order around them and that which is depicted in the works of the masters. This two-fold mission of fine arts instruction (to create and encounter beauty) finds expression in the K-5 Studio Art courses.
In keeping with the developmental capacities of children, Studio Art in grades K-2 is structured experientially. That is, students spend most of their time learning the
requisite skills of art through working with various artistic media. In Kindergarten, this means spending much of the class time learning how properly use artists’ tools.
Additionally, students will be learning the habits of being artists. Creating art takes incredible effort and perseverance and while some students are more inclined to
artistic skill, Studio Art is not a place where only the gifted few participate in creating beauty. All students will learn the proper ways to use artists’ tools, to see as artists, and to participate readily and knowledgeably in the larger conversations in the world of art.
Foundational to art is the ability to perceive the world in the picture plane. Kindergarten students begin the journey of understanding how the three dimensional
is represented in a two-dimensional picture plane by studying shape—both geometric and natural. Next, they will take an in-depth look at how artists use
light, medium, and dark values to create the illusion of form.
The year culminates in a study of color and the ways artists use it to further the recreation of 3-D forms in
the picture plane and evoke emotional imagery.
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