Dewey's advice for studio art education

Dewey wrote a lot about education early in his life, but very little about art education.  Later he wrote Art as Experience which was his most influential writing in aesthetics, and yet this book says little directly about art education.  My experiment here is to imagine a list of practical recommendations for the art studio based on this later work.  I'll try to provide quotes and page references (from the Perigree printing of 2005) to back this up.  I will probably add to this and revise over the next month.  

Advice to Artists

1.     The business of an artist is to create “an experience” for herself and for audience members.  An experience is an organic whole.

2.     The creative process, when authentic, begins with a striking moment followed by development towards completion.

3.     The artist should also attend to how the audience will respond creatively to her work:  the audience members too will undergo development towards conclusion.

4.     Attend always to your medium:  the arts are different based on the exploitation “of the energy that is characteristic of the material used as a medium.”  (253)

5.     Art is a matter of self-expression.

6.     Just as the physical materials change so too  inner materials are progressively reformed in the creative process. (77)  It is through this that the expressive at is built up.

7.     Take materials from the public realm, transmit and intensify the qualities in your medium.  Then put back into the public realm.

8.     Focus on developing rhythm in your work.  “Rhythm is rationality among qualities.” (175)

9.     Rhythm requires both repetition and variation.

10. A work that has rhythm is one in which parts and whole interpret each other.  (177)  Good work allows the distinctive parts to re-enforce each other, building up a complex integrated experience.

11.   Rhythms  “consolidate and organize the energies involved in having an experience” (177)

12.  Art is the organization of energies.  (192)

13.   Rhythm of nature comes before rhythm of art:  artistic form is rooted in these rhythms.  Bring the rhythms of everyday life into the studio.  (153)

14.   The studio artist should also be creative in her appreciation of art.  She should seek to “grasp the phases of objects that specially interest a particular artist.”  (134)

15.   The artist should see her work as drawing from the past into the present and projecting into the future:  “the expressiveness of the object of art is due to the fact that it presents a thorough and complete interpenetration of the materials of undergoing and action.”   (107) 

16.   In good art the means are fused with the ends.