Smoothemuse

bigwordsexciteme:

The letter I had to write to the AP Art students of next year. Long? Clearly. Worth it? Totally.

So you’ve signed up for the most difficult AP that Harborfields has to offer.  That was not sarcastic.  At all.  When you tell your friends and classmates that you’re taking AP Art, they might laugh and say “pfft, yeah, that’s hard”, but really – it is.  They don’t even know.  It consumes so much of your time, both in-school and out of school, so you better know that you love art.  It really does take a lot of effort to stay afloat, (and sane), in this class, and while I can’t help you to make more time, I can give you tips so that you can pretend that you might just have enough time.  So here it goes:

-Choose your concentration wisely.  Try to avoid choosing something terribly superficial and difficult to execute.  I mean, you want to challenge yourself, of course, but do it in a way that you feel that you’ll be successful and less likely to get bored and start to make stupid or unpleasant-looking work.  Your concentration is the more important of the categories, (breadth and concentration), for the main fact that you need to have some solid word, phrase, or idea connecting all of your pieces.  Nearly any piece that does not fit into your concentration can go into your breadth – so long as it is decent.

-If you don’t have time, make time.  You can study for your other APs during other classes and free periods and when you don’t have inspiration to do anything.  You cannot paint or draw or photograph a finished piece during other classes and when you are utterly uninspired without the piece coming out like crap.  When you are inspired, you need to milk that for all it is worth.  You need to truck through that piece and get as much done as you can – and enjoy it.  If you didn’t have fun working on a piece it will show.  Maybe that is what you want to convey, then…okay.  That’s cool too.  Pieces look better when it looks like you’ve enjoyed working on it though, just a heads up.  If you can’t balance art and everything else that you do – AP art is probably the worst choice that you can make in your high school career other than drawing rocket ships all over school desks and signing your name.

-If you don’t think that art has meaning – why are you even in this class?

-Keep up with the work.  You can change your concentration all you want, so long as you’re making up the pieces in time, because really, it is one of the worst feelings in the world when you’re three weeks away from the AP and you realize that you might be a couple of pieces short and you’re trying to throw something together and nothing is coming out right and you’re so scared that you might have to submit pieces that you don’t even like or that didn’t come out like you wanted.  That is read exactly how you read it.  Running out of breath and terrified and upset and angry.  If you are capable of making a piece a day – do it.  Make as many pieces as you possibly can.  If you’re inspired, make a piece and work it into your concentration – or just make it so that you remain sane.  You will go through all of your pieces and toss out many of them in your final concentration arrangement.  Keep making pieces.  Don’t stop if you’ve already done the assignment or think that you have enough.

-The work you make in the beginning of the year will probably make up a good deal of your college portfolio, (assuming that you’re sending a portfolio to your college), and you want the work to be good.  So don’t hand in bad work just to hand it in.  You WILL get a horrible grade, and you WILL destroy your average, and you WILL be embarrassed when you hang it up on the wall.  You don’t want to be embarrassed.  If a piece doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit.  That doesn’t mean that you can’t use it.  You can put it in your breadth portfolio.  Just don’t get so attached to a certain piece that you can’t make a cohesive concentration because you’re trying to make everything fit into that one idea.

-Your concentration is meant to evolve.  Evolve in medium, evolve in idea, evolve in meaning.

-Oh, right, critiques.  We do those too.  That’s when you and your classmates talk about each others’ work.  You are likely to be torn to shreds if you hand in a particularly crappy piece.  It doesn’t matter how much you “like” the piece.  If it’s a bad piece, it’s a bad piece.  Don’t try to talk the butt out of your assignment or concentration, because when it comes time to look at your series as a whole, it will be full of hot air, you will have not done as well as you could have, it will not be as coherent as you think, and again you will be left embarrassed and with a lot of work. 

    Overall, though, the class is a fantastic experience as long as you do what you have to.  You get to do a lot of art, (which, considering you are in this class is what you like to do), you will potentially grow as an artist, you get a lot of feedback on your work.  I mean, come on, you upload your images to the server, and then as a class you mat your quality pieces – and then you’re done.  Then you can have a party, (GET IT, AP ART- Y), and eat food, and paint things, and feel a tiny bit less stressed.  AP Art IS a great class, though, and it is definitely worth it to take it.  So have fun with it.

Okay!

Sincerely,

Me

That’s super-honesty right there. I’d be excited to take this if I were an underclassman/woman.