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101 Things to Learn in Art School could have been subtitled, "How to Open Your Mind to Art School." Kit White's imaginative new book isn't a pedestrian tutorial on art movements and checklists of materials; its one hundred and one meditations, demonstrations, and maxims serve as prompts for making your art more than an imitation. That White is both a versatile artist and a successful teacher seems completely logical; this springboard toolkit is transparently a labor of love.
Paperback
First published September 14, 2011
Every work of art should contain whatever it needs to fulfill its descriptive objective but nothing more. Look at the "leftover" parts of every composition. Successful images have no dead spaces or inactive parts. Look at your components holistically and make sure that every element advances the purpose of the whole.This representative text can either strike you as profound and worthy of reflection, as banal or as very incomplete, since it leaves the reader to decide what is a "descriptive objetive", a "leftover" part of a composition, a dead space, an inactive part, and so on. As other reviewers have pointed, this is not a book that rewards reading it through linearly, it is more of a dip into, read a page and reflect on it sort of book, a jumping board, as another Goodreads reviewer puts it. In fact the book can also be read as a set of notes for class classes, the sort of note that, as a teacher, you write on an index card and put on your desk to remind you of the point you are trying to make in a lecture.