We covered such a breadth of information in Visual Aesthetics that I don’t want to try and make a list of what I learned–I’d inevitably leave something off.
I don’t know why, but every time I start to write this post my mind keeps wandering back to a class I took my last semester as an undergraduate at UNC. Visual Culture was one of my favorite classes of my undergraduate career, and it was because it taught me to look at things for what they were, instead of judging the object itself first. We spent an entire week talking about the tradition of quilt making in the United States and I remember feeling rather indifferent about quilts before that week. We talked about quilts in their own context, and I came to appreciate quilts as an amazing visual artifact of culture.
I don’t know how that all connects to Visual Aesthetics, because that course wasn’t really about aesthetics, but I felt like talking about it, and I know this course makes me appreciate that course I took almost 4 years ago even more than I did at the time.
In the very first post, we wrote what we hoped to get out of this course. I wanted to be better at coming up with ideas and more confident in my creative abilities. I definitely feel more confident, and I’ve learned that being good at ideas just takes time and experience.