OCAD University’s Summer Intensive Program

— by Kayla Preston-Lord, second-year student, Printmaking

Now in its fifth year, the Summer Intensive Program grew out of a brainstorming session between Jan Sage, Director of Admissions & Recruitment here at OCAD University, and Faculty of Design Professor Lewis Nicholson. “Nicholson explained to me that he and many other first-year professors wished they had a chance to interact with prospective students before first year, to make them desperate to attend OCAD!” Sage recognized this desire as a great opportunity to offer those interested in attending art and design school an intensive preview of the OCADU learning environment. Thanks to Sage’s endless passion and enthusiasm, the Summer Intensive Program has tripled in size since its first year, and has been described as a “remarkable, powerful and intimate experience.”

This summer’s first week of programming began with Nicholson assigning participants a conceptually challenging project: find an object, he asked, and then repurpose it. This task was to be undertaken at home and brought back on at the end of the week for critique, a week during which the Summer Intensive Program ran three different day-long workshops for maximum art and design exposure. “What we want students to learn is that what’s “ ‘between their ears’ is what makes them a fabulous artist or designer, as opposed to superior technique,” Sage says. Natalie Waldburger, a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Art, introduced students to encaustic painting, while Industrial Design Chair Jules Goss lead participants through an exercise in lamp shade construction.

Budding artists and designers of all ages were drawn to the Summer Intensive Program from far beyond the borders of Toronto. Samuel Bernier-Cormier, a Grade 12 student and proficient oil painter, will be returning to China where his father works as a diplomat for his last year of secondary school in September. Jill Corbett, another Grade 12 student, decided to participate in the program while visiting from Mission, British Columbia. Graduating post-secondary students who refused to let their passion for art and design wane were also inspired to attend the program. “I graduated high school wanting to go into interior design, but I was discouraged by my peers who advised me that the field is too competitive,” explains Claudia Perreira, a fourth-year student majoring in French and Linguistics at York University. Throughout her undergraduate degree, Perreira continued to do small-scale interior design work and now plans to apply to OCADU for Environmental Design in the fall.

Conversely, University of Toronto graduate Dave Scrivener didn’t discover his flair for design until he entered the workplace and began dabbling in graphic design through process of elimination. “The fact that I knew how to operate Adobe InDesign put me in a position to do a huge volume of graphic layouts,” Scrivener says. “Over the two years that I’ve worked there, I got bored with just laying stuff out, and started trying to manipulate, change and try new things.” Scrivener came to the Summer Intensive Program expecting to strengthen his text-based graphic design skills, but was surprised when he became “interested in the craft of creating imagery that you have to work to get the meaning from. It’s the necessity to try to communicate ideas and arguments purely visually, or through sound or through light, all of these different mechanisms; thats such a fun challenge for me.”

Many students’ horizons were broadened not only by exposure to unfamiliar artistic and design practices, but also by having the opportunity to “intermingle with other people,” explains Laurel Rennie. As a Grade 12 student at Walkerville Creative Centre for the Arts in Windsor, Ontario, Rennie says that “being in the same building in high school, all of the art students are influenced by each other, so we tend to make similar work. At the Summer Intensive Program, everyone’s coming from different areas, so there are lot of different minds and ways of creating.” Through the critique process, Rennie came to realize that “your ideas are really important. Even if there’s no final product, what you learn while you’re working with your ideas can be valuable, and you can take something away from that.”

Her sentiment echoes Sage’s desire for participants in the program to find their true voice and come into contact with numerous modes of expression. “There is nothing to lose in this program; no grades, and nothing’s at stake. It’s just the pure experience of learning.”