IB VISUAL ART REQUIREMENT: Visit an art museum and an art gallery

You are required to visit both museums and galleries - a minimum of one visit to a museum and one visit to a gallery each semester.

Bay Area Art Museums:

SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Contemporary Jewish Museum, De Young, Legion of Honor, Cantor Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum, Oakland Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art

Visit the special exhibitions and plan to go on docent tours

San Francisco galleries:

Minnesota Street Project, Southern Exposure, 111 Minna, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery

Local galleries:

Sanchez Art Center -is located in Pacifica and has multiple gallery spaces

Peninsula Museum of Art - is located in Burlingame, across the street from Peninsula Hospital, entrance is free.

Skyline College Art Gallery -hours vary during the semester, plan ahead

Society of Western Artists (SWA) Gallery - is located in San Bruno on San Mateo Ave

Take your sketchbook and use it. Take notes on what you see. Write your impressions, what did the work make you feel? You should be able to respond to the work on a personal level.

Buy postcards!

If you see some things that inspires you- sketch it, photograph it, record the idea

Draw with different media – pen, pencil, pastel

Annotate your sketches to capture the moment

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What you should do:

• Look, listen, absorb, study, draw, be interested and enthusiastic.
• Everything has the potential to be interesting. It is your job to make it enthralling.
• Interpret the world by making art and responding to it in imaginative and creative ways.
• Investigate images and artifacts and extend your experience of works of art in museums and galleries in the local setting and through contact with artists

Conduct research for Studio Work

Sketching and drawing from observed artworks

• Consider how to make the best use of your time. Quick notes and diagrams about several art works may achieve more than a single impressive drawing. On the other hand, if you have the time, in-depth drawing can help you ‘tune-in’ to the piece. If you find lots of questions coming to the surface note them as you draw.
• What is the purpose of your sketch?
• Do you want to record a texture, analyze the composition, solve a problem, compare two works of art?
• Are you focusing on the form of the artwork, or its meaning?
• Are you recording its appearance or transforming it imaginatively?
• If you can’t take a photograph or buy a postcard, is it worth trying to reproduce the work in a sketch? If you want to record the appearance, look out for aspects you can only see in the real thing, for example fine changes of texture or how a sculpture looks from different angles.
• When there are aspects you can’t explain in you sketch, write notes. These aspects might include particular qualities of light, color, line, or texture or your thoughts about moods or symbols.
• Try ‘memory drawing’. Look at an artwork for a minute then turn around and draw what you can remember. This forces you to look hard and develops visual memory skills.
• Drawing three-dimensional objects and sculptures can be very satisfying because you are dealing first hand with light and shade on planes. Walk around a sculpture thinking about its impact from different perspectives, making several sketches. Is it supposed to be seen from one viewpoint? Draw it from a distance and close-up.
• Drawing tends to force an emphasis on the formal elements of art. However, some art requires a focus on conceptual, narrative or emotional aspects. Talk is the very best way to deal with these, but drawing can be used to analyze how images or objects work to communicate meanings.
  • What draws you in?
  • What could be beyond the visible?
  • What would it be like inside there?
• Use drawing to explore the gallery or museum space. How has the art been arranged? What is the architecture like? Use drawing to imaging how the work might come across elsewhere, such as outdoors or over a fireplace. Show the scale of an object by drawing it in relation to other objects and/or the things that surround it.