Verve and Evidence of Thinking in APSA

An AP Studio Art Reader comments:
What is Evidence of Thinking and what is Verve and how can we teach it?

Boy, those are the million dollar AP questions! Both are what really draw a
bright line between a 4 and a 5.  Both add that extra artistic fillip that goes
on top of simple technical expertise and takes the serious hobbyist to the big
leagues.  They are the cherry on our sundae.

But what are they?

I will tackle verve first. Verve is that extra oomph that comes from
dedicated practice that allows the artist to exaggerate or create right up
to the edge of disaster without going over the cliff into a muddled mess- or 
worse, into kitsch. Verve is the difference 
between dancing the tango with your lover and dancing the tango with your mom,
between a work of art that makes you smile and one that makes you laugh out loud. 

Verve is duende.  It's risky. Trying to force verve usually means you are going
to fail at it.  Teaching and quantifying it is may be difficult, some might
feel impossible, but like a Higgs Bosan that we cannot see or touch ourselves,
we can recognize verve by the trail it leaves and can reach it indirectly. 
I am of the mind that if the basics in whatever you are learning are learnt
so well that they become second nature, then verve is a natural progression
IF the student is also able to take risks and be comfortable with failure.
So we teachers must emphasize practice, give exercises that develop looseness
and fluidity, encourage do overs and celebrate risk taking.

Evidence of thinking might appear to be an elusive goal to quantify, but
like Justice Potter Stewart and obscenity, he knew it when he saw it. It
simply means that the viewer had an idea that what you did was intentional. 
It has absolutely nothing to do with creating an artwork with a specific
subject matter or deep meaning. Evidence of thinking means that when you
created an artwork, you made conscious decisions all along the way in color,
texture, value, composition, etc. that enhanced your message in creative,
engaging and thought-provoking ways.

Many of our students think that non-representational art is a total happy accident
and probably they might be right about some of it. But when Pollack dripped
his paint, he was thinking as he did it. If he didn't think about what he was doing
as he painted, then the paintings would't have had balance, a coherent texture,
and movement.  You might not like his work, but it certainly shows evidence
of thought even with a surface texture that appears entirely random. 

A reader sees evidence of thinking when a student has a thoughtful composition
that enhances the message, when a texture is chosen that is repeated to create unity,
and when color is used to create rhythm or a dash of a complementary color is used
to make the focal point pop.  While happy accidents are the rewards of successful
risk taking (verve!) and are gratefully accepted by the artist, it's evidence of
thinking that creates that level of professional polish that raises the work from
average to outstanding.