Frank Galuszka–Teaching Statement 2000-01
Professor, Art Department

The kinds of courses I teach

I currently teach beginning, intermediate and advanced painting courses to undergraduate students for the Art Department at UCSC. When not teaching painting, I engage in my own painting, in my studio and at various outdoor locations.

At UCSC I have also taught independent studies seminars in design. These classes dealt with design in the broadest sense and might best be called seminars in General Theory of Design. I also teach other independent studies in the art department. The include ongoing independent studies in which I take on different student apprentices each quarter who work with me in my studio, on my work and on their own.

My teaching career has included courses in theory and courses in practice. At the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, I designed seminars in which graduate students in Architectural Studies, Museum Exhibition and Design, Industrial Design and in Printmaking and Book Arts met in interdisciplinary groups of about fifteen students each. One of these seminars was "Metaphor and Structure," the other was "Criticism." I have also taught graduate painting and a number of very specialized undergraduate courses in painting and design—Color Theory, Perspective, Materials and Techniques and Figure Drawing among them.

My approach to teaching

New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl describes painting as an "unbeatable example of and metaphor for individual consciousness." I teach painting with this description in mind.

My undergraduate classes at UCSC emphasize "hands on" situations. Students create artworks in class. The most conspicuous teaching takes the form of individual and group critiques of proposed projects, of processes, and of ongoing and finished works. In introductory classes students create artworks in relation to parameters outlined in class. In such classes I do demonstrations, lecture, and give at least two critiques to each student in each class. In advanced classes, students are taught to design parameters for themselves and the discourse among students has increased importance.

I use both explicit and implicit strategies in teaching.

By explicit strategies, I mean that I do these things: I lay out the mission of the course, the objective of my pedagogical approach, I present theoretical and practical content, explain my expectations of the students, and I describe what students should expect to experience as problems in the course of meeting the goals presented at the outset of the class. My intentions and expectations are discussed with the class in a way that encourages students to witness their own learning and the learning of one another. Because painting is visible, the process of creating artworks is visible in an ongoing way to everyone in the class. This makes it easy to observe, discuss and critique artwork as a group. By implicit strategies I mean those actions that are meant to be more or less invisible to the student. These are not discussed. Primary among these is the task of building the class into an effective community that is committed to learning.

My teaching philosophy

I am interested in cybernetics, in the role of feedback in learning, and in so-called second order or deutero-learning—the "learning to learn." I am mindful of this in every part of my teaching.

In learning to make paintings each student must learn to link personal disposition and a body of knowledge in a paradoxical object. The painting is, for instance, an object and not-object at the same time, an act of consciousness and a metaphor for consciousness, manifest and obscure, a cultural and an individual production, rational and nonrational, substance and image, etc. The student must learn to manage contradictions and tolerate instabilities in the course of creating something that seems to be enthralling and dispiriting in turns.

I apply what I have learned from cybernetics "invisibly" to my classes. Each class is introduced with a clear and concrete description of the mission of the class, of my expectations of the students, and of detailed parameters, a program for the class. Students who are not interested in the contract presented are invited to leave. Very often the parameters do not look as "free" or "creative" as the entering student hopes. But the intent of the parameters is emancipatory, and the way in which they are expected to be emancipatory is discussed. By working within the parameters, the student can expect to be both more independent and more competent at the conclusion of the class.

Let me give an example. In teaching "Introduction to Oil Painting," there are several problems from the start. For instance, some of the students are more experienced than others, and some are more seriously interested in the subject than others. Some have a strong vision of what they want to do. Furthermore, the teaching of painting has well-known pitfalls: to teach a hands-on "way to paint" focuses on highly niched and ultimately inflexible skills that pre-ordain theory, while to teach from a purely theoretical perspective tends to isolate ideas from achievement—that is, it doesn't provide the student with adequate means to realize ideas in visual material form. My solution is to teach "Four Ways of Painting"—four distinct techniques that attend four distinct orientations to subject, ideas, and outcome, selected from the history of oil painting. The first of these is the prevalent seventeenth century approach. It includes underpainting, overpainting, and glazing and emphasizes accurate depiction. The second approach is plein air painting—the direct outdoor pursuit of analogs to observed nature that flourished in the nineteenth century. The third is cubism—the systematic deformation and subversion of subject matter by quasi-geometric form that emerged in the early twentieth century. And finally, abstraction, the fourth way—creation of paintings out of the constituent parts of the medium (framing edge of the painting, intrinsic and non-referential, non-mimetic qualities of color, mark, etc.—mid-twentieth century). Students feel their competence build throughout the quarter. Each way of painting introduces the students to a different set of values. Students usually find that one approach resonates with them more than the others, and this approach is frequently a point of departure for their subsequent independent work in advanced classes.

My teaching accomplishments

I have been teaching art since 1968. Since then I have worked individually with about 3000 students. I have designed a number of courses, in committees and individually, have composed syllabi, and developed programs, notably graduate programs in painting, in printmaking and in ceramics for the University of the Arts and undergraduate courses of study in figurative art in the same institution. I have experimented with various formats of classes, emphasizing group projects and collaborations as well as individual work.

In 1993 I chaired a conference titled "Cybernetics in the Art of Learning." This conference looked at learning in child development, in education, in the humanities, arts and sciences, in psychotherapy, in other clinical settings, in business management and in daily life. Over seventy presenters from fourteen countries participated in this meeting. This conference was held at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where I was a professor of Graduate Studies in Art. It was funded by UARTS, the American Society for Cybernetics and by the Dupont Corporation.

My daily experience as a teacher, my ongoing work as a painter and my continuing interest in cybernetics result in periodic re-evaluations of my teaching, and both my syllabi and in-class performance relect corrections and adjustments.

I have frequently taken learning beyond the classroom at UCSC mostly by way of uncompensated independent studies. In my independent study seminar in design I arranged for visitors in art, engineering, computer program design, psychology, psychiatry, ecoscience and childhood education to meet with my students over a two-year period and discuss issues of design with them. These same students developed a reader in one quarter that was used as a text in another course (Senior Studio in Painting) the subsequent quarter and included the design students as discussion leaders. Two of these three students subsequently won Dean's and Chancellor's awards. I also organized an international workshop at Baskin Arts, UCSC to address problems of Planning and Design in 1997.