For some students who believed their art skills ceased to develop since second-grade art class, an art display in the Vergette Gallery last week demonstrated that their artistic ability does not have to come from formal training such as majoring in art.

Art display organizer Melinda Hodge, a School of Art and Design graduate student, is instructing Art Education 348, the class in which all the displayed art was created.

The artists featured in the display are collectively unique. Hodge said the students who created the artwork are all education majors who believed that their art skills could never create anything remotely capable of display.

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These are not art students, and they’re not art majors, she said. They’re pretty much, in their minds, art failures. They’re all beginners in a sense.

Hodge said the students’ skills were at ground level at the beginning of the semester. She had to provide some creative motivation for the students because their skills had limited them to a particular mind-set of art.

If I gave them free reign, they would have just done hearts and rainbows and pumpkins. They thought everything had to be related to a holiday, she said. It’s a no-no to use those symbols because it ends up being sameness and it stifles creativity.

To initiate creativity in the art beginners, Hodge helped the students in her two-hour class to see art from a new perspective. The education majors studied proportion, composition, positive and negative space and researched other cultures as sources of inspiration.

The resulting original artwork was displayed last week in the Vergette Gallery, located on the second floor of the Allyn Building. The pieces of art included crayon etchings, clay sculptures, weavings and pencil sketches among other things.

They’re finally exposing themselves to different forms of art. By exposure to different cultures, things like this come more freely, Hodge said. They would not have come up with these designs if they hadn’t pushed themselves to do research of different designs.

Hodge said she made sure every one of the 30 students in the art education class had work displayed because it was important for them to see how their work developed through the semester.

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There is work from everyone in my class. It’s not like I picked out one or two of the best, she said. I want them to see growth in their work and be surprised that they did it.

Hodge said setting up the art display took up the majority of her time for about a month, but it was well worth the effort.

I’m really pleased with the quality. [The students] have shown a lot of effort, and that’s what’s important to me, she said. I know they don’t feel like they’re an art failure now. I think they’re pleased with what they did. Learning to draw doesn’t come overnight.

Hodge said this was the first time a display like this has been done, and there has been good response from faculty and students.

She also said Art Education 348 is the perfect class for someone who feels they have no use for art or that they cannot create worthwhile art.

Anyone who feels they can’t make art should take this class, she said. Creativity comes from new ideas.