Art school confidential
MANILA, Philippines - Making art is tough. Sure, sometimes there’s some B.S. that comes with it (“It’s just abstract, I swear”), but from conceptualizing a piece, creating it, and possibly redoing it, there’s a lot of work and, in some ways, a lot of bravery, too. Just ask any artist out there. We may not know what Caravaggio or Banksy have to say on the matter, but we reckon we’re not far off the mark.
Even harder is the process of learning or even teaching it. Going to art school isn’t like learning algebra; 2x + 7y isn’t equal to Picasso. The Philippines has over a hundred universities and colleges that offer courses such as Fine Arts and Graphic Design, so a lot of us are clearly into the creative arts. But how do you teach someone how to be more creative, anyway?
We turned to visual artists Tof Zapanta and Tata Yap to help us figure it out. Tof is a design faculty member at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde’s School of Design and Arts and Tata is a graphic design lecturer at the Ateneo de Manila University, so they know a thing or two about teaching art and creating it. According to them, even tried and tested methods (both in teaching and creating) yield different results, despite tons of practice. Why that is so, we’re not sure. Art’s pretty tough to crack that way, but that’s also what makes it kinda fun.
