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BFA: Drawing

In Foundation Drawing, you learn to visualize your thoughts and ideas through the development of perception and extensive exploration of the language of drawing. Drawing enables you to clarify and articulate the various stages in the evolution of ideas and formal issues essential to all disciplines. This gives you the confidence to investigate a wide range of visual and conceptual ideas.
A weekly full-day drawing studio offers the opportunity for intensive work with the human figure, landscape, still life and thematic content. Through clear observation, you will explore form as it pertains to visual representation and the organization of surface through line, shape, light, texture and space. In strengthening concepts of drawing, you will learn to see differently and be better equipped to enter whatever major you choose.

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FOUNDATION STUDIES OVERVIEW

As the studio curriculum for all first-year undergraduate students at RISD, Foundation Studies is comprised of three programs of study: Drawing, Two-Dimensional Design and Three-Dimensional Design, each of which meets one full day per week. Freshmen are assigned to a section of approximately 20 students who attend the three studio classes together.

Foundation faculty members emphasize the development of rigorous critical inquiry and motivate you to learn independently. Projects are varied and designed to challenge you to explore, to question and to take risks. At the end of each project, critiques are held so that you can reflect on your intentions and processes, along with the capacity of the work to embody ideas and emotions.

Studio work is complemented by visits from guest lecturers, artists and critics, and by occasional field trips. Other resources for the Foundation program include the Foundation/Fine Arts Computer Lab, the Fleet Library at RISD and the RISD Museum of Art. In addition, the Edna W. Lawrence Nature Lab, which offers hands-on access to a comprehensive collection of natural specimens, is a vital and unique part of first-year study at RISD. The Nature Lab and selected Foundation studios are housed in the Waterman Building, a neo-Romanesque structure built in 1893 as RISD's very first building.

Foundation Studies faculty members are practicing artists and/or designers from a range of professional disciplines who are exceptionally dedicated to teaching first-year students. In addition to the core faculty, visiting faculty members from various RISD departments are invited to teach in the Foundation program, and Foundation faculty often teach in other departments as well.