Visual arts education

Visual arts education is the area of learning that is based upon only the kind of art that one can see, visual arts—drawing, painting, sculpture, and design in jewelry, pottery, weaving, fabrics, etc. and design applied to more practical fields such as commercial graphics and home furnishings. Contemporary topics include photography, video, film, design, and computer art. Art education may focus on students creating art, on learning to criticize or appreciate art, or some combination of the two.

Approaches

Art is often taught through drawing, an empirical activity which involves seeing, interpreting and discovering appropriate marks to reproduce an observed phenomenon. Drawing instruction has been a component of formal education the West since the Hellenistic period. In East Asia, arts education for nonprofessional artists typically focused on brushwork; calligraphy was numbered among the Six Arts of gentlemen in the Chinese Zhou Dynasty, and calligraphy and Chinese painting were numbered among the Four Arts of scholar-officials in imperial China.