Assignment Sheet: Short Essay

Graded Components and Percent Values:

1. Essay 80%
2. Annotated Images 10%
3. Interview Notes 10%

Due Dates: To Be Filled In By Faculty

Assignment Goal:
The goal of this lesson is to make you consider thoroughly and carefully your artistic
choices within the context of your field and its prevailing traditions, movements,
conventions, and techniques, so that you can develop greater awareness of what your art
says and means.

Assignment Learning Objectives: This assignment will teach you to…

• Engage in a dialogue with a seasoned professional artist in order to shed light on
your own work and its contexts.
• Recognize, describe and expand on the key elements of a significant artistic
tradition that is widely recognized in your field.
• Identify a piece of your own artwork that adheres to or challenges a significant
artistic tradition.*
• Undertake original visual analysis of one of your own artworks.
• Compose a piece of writing that thoughtfully positions your art within the context
of an artistic tradition.

Interview a Professional Artist:

• Prepare a portfolio of your work to show to a professional artist in your field.
• Identify an artist mentor (such as the chairperson or faculty member of your
concentration) with whom you can discuss your portfolio of work and the
traditions or influences that inform it.
• Together, identify an important tradition in your field that informs your work.
• Take notes on your interview conversation and discoveries to turn in to your
Professional Artist instructor.

Choose a piece of your own work to focus on in your short essay:

• Choose a piece of your work that adheres to or challenges an artistic tradition.

Annotate an image of your chosen piece:

• Take a good picture of your piece that shows detail.
• Print the photo of the piece with a one inch or larger white margin around it.
• Write notes on the margin of the image that point to choices of composition, style,
technique, subject matter, etc. Try to focus on those elements that could be used
to prove your piece’s position within an artistic tradition.
Compose a 3 page reflective essay about your piece:
• Introduction: Write an introduction that reflects on your interview with a
professional artist; be sure to end your introductory paragraph with concrete
insights about the tradition(s) that inform your work. This should not be a "Gary
Samson said" type paragraph but an introduction to the body of the essay
based on the discoveries you have made during your research.

• Body Paragraphs: Discuss your specific piece within the context of its adherence
or challenge to artistic tradition. Be sure to point to specific qualities of the work,
including compositional choices, use of materials and processes, stylistic choices
and subject matter in order to position your piece.

• Conclusion: Reflect on what you have learned about yourself as an artist from
this exercise. Write about the insights and information you have gained and about
how they might guide your goals for your work in the future. For instance, do
you wish your work were more challenging of certain traditions? Do you wish
you understood the traditional contexts for your work better in order to more
clearly position yourself? What will your next steps be?

*For the purposes of this assignment, the word tradition is meant to include movements,
conventions, influences, and techniques.