The goals of the BFA curriculum in painting are to provide students with basic painting concepts taught in inspiring ways, to expose students to the range and multiplicity of ideas that generate contemporary approaches to painting, to stimulate a full understanding of those concepts and to challenge students to develop a personal vocabulary of painterly forms and create a store of visual ideas relating to their own lives and experiences. The sequence of courses in painting begins with the 2000 level, where color, value, and figure-ground relationships are explored in both theory and practice. Classroom and independent exercises are rooted in strategies of observation as well as abstraction. Students’ work is divided between carefully structured assignments and individually contracted projects.

At the 3000 level, students go through a broadening experience that includes figure painting from live models, experimental painting, advanced work in 2-D composition and serial exploration of individually defined projects. In this intense two-semester sequence, the students gain a wide-ranging understanding of painting practice and what it means to think like a painter. In the culminating 4000-level course, students move into the dedicated senior painting studios, where they further hone their individual visions and develop the critical and conceptual skills needed to realize personal and individual goals as painters.

The Graduate programs in Painting and Drawing are designed to further the student’s art making practice through the development of enhanced conceptual, aesthetic and technical skills. The programs also provide the student access to a wide variety of courses, including classical and contemporary art history, criticism, aesthetics, postmodern thought, art law, arts administration, museum studies and the business of art. Graduate faculty offer instruction through a series of rotating, topic-specific Painting and Drawing graduate seminar courses as well as individual instruction on a tutorial basis and meet with individuals or small groups regularly. Complementing this individual instruction is a series of group critiques involving the Painting and Drawing students and faculty. These critique sessions offer the student a wide variety of opinions and provide a public forum for lively topical discussions and sometimes-conflicting points of view.