Anne asks: How was your experience as a student at OCAD and did OCAD influence your style of art?

[laur...@lauraleekharris.com]

Hi Anne,
Nice to meet you,
I loved OCAD for the simple reason there were all the different
creative minds under one roof...including the teachers and staff. What
kinetic energy not to mention the tour de force of veritable
expressions of personas marching through campus and hallways, everyone
marching proud to there own beat. That in itself was inspirational
even before getting to class and seeing what they came up with for
their assignments....lol... The two teachers that really influenced my
style of art was Colour Theorist and maverick Jacques Dagenais; that’s
where I learned my passion for colour, the math and logic behind it.
He was amazing the way he taught it. You couldn’t help love all the
possibilities to colour once he got through with you. Another
professor who inspired me was Paul Walty who taught a media course
because, when I took his course, I thought I was going to learn the
traditional basics behind watercolour, oil pastels and the like. But
no. We were sent to the grocery store to create art. We were sent to
the hardware store to create art. We were taught to explore and
experiment and the visual incarnations that developed from imagining
what the ordinary could become when used somewhere else, became
extraordinary in its usage and design. I think these two classes alone
helped in my passion and creative vent when it came to creating the
works on wood. Working with different media becomes an exploratory
inner vision first when you imagine not only how it will look, but how
it will work. So a lot of the work was done in my head first
imagining. This taught me a type of thinking that became a de facto
positioning when reasoning the creation of new and different kinds of
art.