How relevant is art in the working world?
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It's funny what art teaches you.
Instructor Aaron Jacobs' class has this "observational drawing" assignment today: Draw the still-life above -- without lifting your pencil off the paper. If you make a mistake, it's a long road back.
That kind of project teaches students to see the the whole picture of what's in front of them:
Jacobs says:
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"Usually, they would draw one piece of the picture, and then another, and then another. This forces them to see the interconnection of all the parts, the relationships, the distance one object has from another."
Sounds like a good lesson for life.
It's a heck of a job, though, for Joycelyn Joyce, a 55-year-old pharmacy technician who's going for her associate's degree and then on to a four-year university:
"Back in the Caribbean, where I come from, we don't do a lot of art like the Americans," she told me.
She enjoys drawing, though I'm not sure whether she saw much relevance of today's lesson in the job world.
Still, she told me:
"One thing it did teach me is concentration."
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