Pratt invited alumni to share their accounts of a memorable experience as students!
Pratt getting alumni around the globe to “share their Harvard” and examine the many elements that compose one’s personal Harvard experience — and how that experience is applied after graduation.
In 1999, I had the great fortune to study Northern Baroque art with Frima Fox Hofrichter and Chinese landscape painting with Borhua Wang. At that time, I was enrolled as an MFA candidate with a focus in painting, but due largely to the experience of that fall 1999 semester, I later switched to the combined degree program of fine arts and art history.
Professor Hofrichter made a great impression for her dynamic enthusiasm and profound knowledge of the subject area. I remember her class as being both challenging and rich, and having benefited at its completion from the creation of a robust art historical structure for a period which I had previously only studied independently. She showed great faith in me as a student scholar, and for that too, I am grateful.
Professor Wang gave me the most precious gift a teacher can give to a student, that is, to open the door to a field of knowledge that they would have never have had access to otherwise. With an artistic formation in plein air landscape painting, I had previously found the Chinese landscape painting tradition, with its monochromatic mists, to be monotonous and blank. Over the course of the semester studying with Professor Wang however, I became attuned to the subtle poetry and serene beauty of landscape as metaphor in lieu of landscape as illusionism The class was rigorous in guiding us deep into that terrain, and to this day, I remain profoundly affected by a perceptual change induced by an introduction to this tradition.
As I am now a teacher myself, teaching art to middle and high school students at the American school in Lisbon, Portugal, I am able, in some small way, to pass on this lineage to my students, so I am very thankful for Professor Wang as her class had a profound effect on my artistic practice, my teaching practice and greatly enriched my life.
John Hawke
Pratt Alumni
To follow his work check : http://johnhawke.com/