Developing a Community of Artists
For 22 years at Santa Clara University, Professor of Art Kelly Detweiler has nurtured a generation of young students, helping them master their skills, find their voices, and prepare for the stubborn pursuit of their muses in a world full of distractions. The atmosphere he prefers is collegial. The relationships he forms with students are lifelong. And the difference, he says, between Santa Clara University and other schools, including art and design colleges, is the first-rate education students get—a foundation for their future, whether it’s going on to graduate school, working for a museum or computer company, or independently pursuing a career as an artist.
After teaching studio art at Santa Clara University for 22 years—including seven years as department chair—Kelly Detweiler holds some well-formed opinions about education in general and art education in particular. Take creativity, for example. Detweiler believes it ought to be emphasized more as an important element in a well-rounded college experience, for art majors and non-majors alike.
With non-majors, Detweiler says that the important thing is to get them to use their hands
creatively. “We try to give them a good, positive experience of what it’s like to make an image, to draw, to paint. They need to experience how it’s not always the easiest solution that they should be looking for, but a solution that is visually the best and the most creative.”
For majors coming into the department, the situation is a little different. These students often feel more comfortable with a computer software package than they do with a pencil, according to Detweiler. The key is to get them to understand the value of using both. “We steer them into life drawing,” Detweiler says, “because there, they can’t get by relying on creativity alone.”
Ideas and emotion
Equally important in an artist’s education is learning how to come up with good ideas. It requires a well-developed intellect—and that, says Detweiler, is where Santa Clara has an edge over art or design schools, because of the range of courses and disciplines that students must master in order to graduate.
Detweiler’s own students display a range of intellectual influence in their art. For example, senior Leslie Rice is a ceramist whose ideas appear representative of a new genre. Detweiler describes her as “an amazing presence,” a student who works very hard and is very serious—and yet, has a bit of the prankster in her too. “She has been building this piece with pictures and string—in the women’s bathroom, actually—and we haven’t a clue where she’s going with it,” he admits with amusement.
Then there is Emily Poporad ’04, also a very serious artist and an accomplished painter. Poporad’s work certainly has an intellectual side, Detweiler says, but it is much more based in emotion. “I can’t really nurture her ideas that much, but I can help her physically with materials, and I try to help her to see,” he says.
In fact, Detweiler considers as one of his main responsibilities helping his students to actually see what they’ve done. “Human beings have an uncanny ability to look at something and not realize how it’s perceived by others,” Detweiler explains.
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