Art is performance based, right?

Art is performance based, right? I had not given the idea too much thought or worry until I received a memo from the district office that stated, "We need all elective courses to have criteria reference testing (CRT) that measures the courses' yearly outcomes."

Yes, art is performance based, but now I had to show how I was going to measure the performance and, more importantly, how the students would be able to see and measure their own progress.

I decided a good starting point would be to develop a CRT that helped the student to test what he or she had learned throughout the year about drawing, shading and composition. In the past, I had always used the all-white still-life projects to set my standards for the whole year. The all-white still life is done with all art students, ranging from beginners to advance. I thought the use of the all-white standard-setting project would be the perfect CRT.

I decided that this year, and in the future, every fall the students could do an all-white CRT that I designed, and then in the spring they would get an opportunity to do another all-white project they designed. At the end of the year the students would assess and critique their yearly progress through a formal or an informal critique. Then the CRT for the beginning of the year and the CRT at the end of the year would be stored in a portfolio that would travel with the student from year to year.

The challenge was going to be to come up with something new and exciting to keep students motivated on the CRT every fall. Some ideas I have used in the past for all-white still lifes included: white paper ribbons; tree branches sprayed white; Styrofoam[R] forms; and paper still lifes. I particularly liked this year's composition of a white shadow box with dangling shapes that the students had to assemble themselves.

The shadow-box lesson began with a demonstration on how to build a box. Next, I had cubes, cylinders and cone shapes photocopied onto 80-lb. paper for students to cut, fold and tape together. After the students had all their shapes in hand, they had to decide where to dangle them in their shadow boxes.

We talked about the Italian term "chiaroscuro," which means the strong contrast between shadows and bright highlights. The students' goal was to achieve this strong contrast when they went to build their shadow box. The room lights were turned off, and each table had a lamp to shine on the shadow box to exaggerate the shadows that the shapes made.

Students became excited when they saw the mysterious shadow that the shapes produced with the enhanced lighting, and were ready to attack their compositional thumbnails using rectangular viewfinders. Students used the viewfinders to decide how much foreground and background they were going to include. They also needed to decide whether they were going to include a horizontal line to form the edge of the table.

Both the students and I are amazed at how many decisions have to be made when producing and thinking about art. The compositional studies are always the most difficult part of the work on any assignment.

Once the students had a strong compositional thumbnail, they enlarged the drawing onto 18" x 24" drawing paper. Next, I decided to try something new and have students block out the shapes that they had drawn with some frisket, which is masking film commonly used by airbrush artists. I thought this would help students keep their edges clean on the shapes and would give them a sense of control. The students blocked out the shapes by tracing the shapes and then used carbon paper to transfer the shapes to the sticky frisket so they could accurately cut out their shapes for their drawings.

After the students had all their shapes safely covered, the next step was to tone the whole composition with charcoal. It was explained to the class that they were going to use both additive and subtractive methods to shade their shadow-box compositions. They would use an eraser to pick up highlights and add charcoal for dark gray and black tones. The toned area they started with would be their middle tones in the composition.

When the class had the backgrounds rendered with about four to six values, we held a class critique to evaluate if they had developed their contrast enough to go ahead and spray the artwork with workable fixative. We reviewed the goal that when rendering shading, they wanted to form edges with value and not with line. The students had to ask themselves whether they had removed all their lines. The next step after the critique was to peel off the frisket and reveal the clean shapes.

At this point, students worked back into the positive shapes with values and worked back into their edges both positively and negatively. The students were reminded to step back from their work and check to make sure the light source was consistent and that the contrast had visual drama.

Students have really grasped the importance of the criteria reference testing in the art classroom. They particularly loved the shadow-box assignment and working with the frisket. Both the students and I were surprised that by working the negative space first, with the aid of the frisket, the students were able to work the whole surface instead of one area at a time. Working the whole surface gave their drawings much more flow and energy.