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Ardyce Miller My personal philosophy on art is that we are living art at all times. It is around us at all times but I think the majority of people are not aware; they haven't actually learned to see. We just need to learn to see and appreciate, then we have art. Ask someone to describe line and they're stopped cold. They've been around it through all their existence; They've had it from the manipulative stage of man where he was just grasping materials and learning how to hold them. His first instinct is to draw it across a surfa,ce regardless whether it's the wall, the floor, or paper. So I go to the very bottom and start an intro to art which is the very bastes in man. Let's have meaning in these things before we go on and do anything further. Art is life, we live it, it's nothin, dead. It's nothing static. Art ilivery much alive; it s within us. Whether we want to recognize it is another factor, and I think more people are recognizing it. You can't segregate art from any other-area. You can't segregate it from the sciences or music or drama. We have rvthmn in art Just as much as we have rythmn in music. We can t segregate art from math because we have the size the proportion the relationships, that are just as important in a painting as they are in that automobile out there that gives it personal appeal. Take even your art history and all of your archeologi-cal diggings- they reveal the past to us. Facts about the past, which we thought we had established date-wise, are changing. There are maybe older artifacts than the known ones, so where we've said this piece 3f art is the oldest known piece of art -boorn- an archeologist over in Asia Minor comes to us with works that can be identified through modern chemical means, and here again, here we have chemistry and physics. And this idea 'Well, I can't draw a straight line'· great! You might be the next Michaelangelo. We don't need straight lines. Sort of slow down and learn to see and when you learn to see and learn to look you begin to appreciate. When you can appreciate one aspect of life then you are going to begin to look into others and you're going to have an understanding of more than just the visual things that are surrounding you at this moment. After all, we have a very limited knowledge- farmiliarity around us and if we don't try to expand ourselves we limit our ability tq appreciate. I have students who have done artwork from the time they were in the first grade. I have students who come in and say 'I have never had any art instruction'. Some say they haven't had any art since the fifth grade. They are sitting side by side and they are going to start com-paring their own work which I discourage very much. I stress very strongly that because of the differences in their backgrounds they should not compare their work against a fellow student's. We still have basic rules and regulations. Many of these have been done away with in many art schools. Some feel that you can just go ahead and work in a free form without any knowledge; I'll use the idea of perspective. I think more perspective should be gained not to a depth where you are going to spend hours or years as some of our artists have done in the past but get a little more background in how things are done and all of a sudden, interests in other areas are created