His perceptions are extremely important and they need to be listened to. In 1972, ten years after reading about Stieglitz's ideas on the equivalent in photography, I found myself in a meeting with the Art Department faculty here at Slippery Rock. The occasion was a curriculum meeting designed to draft the BFA degree proposal. Our task was to define our purpose as to teaching art in our program. When a student fully understands that art grows out of experience and knows that he must, as an artist, create from experience, he will have learned that which is basic to all art. . .
Art begins with an idea.
The artist is the source of the idea. It is the job of any studio art teacher to first help the student recognize that his own experiences are the central resources in the making of art. The most effective art teacher is one who is also a professional artist himself. The classroom is really the student's studio where students go to creatively work on art, not a place where they have to go to meet the professor's deadlines. Art, of course, involves craft and a most thorough understanding of whatever medium is being employed.