Shortly after the 9:30 a.m. bell sounds, the 24 students in Michael Reingold’s Drawing Foundations class begin sketching a classmate who has gamely agreed to model for them, an off-white sheet draped over her blue top and khaki pants. The week’s lesson is on gesture, so Reingold encourages pupils to make as few pencil lines as possible before using charcoal to block out shape and shadow. It’s a commonplace assignment in an introductory college art studio — except that these students are 14 and 15 years old, freshmen at the Charter High School of Architecture and Design (CHAD) in Philadelphia.
It was in Reingold’s class that Ryan Brown had an epiphany about conveying motion with lines. “The opening of a line has to be toward the direction of the motion,” Brown remembers. “I got mad at myself when I realized it was that easy.” On this morning in late February, Brown, now a senior, is taking several visitors around CHAD. He points with pride at a wall of college acceptance letters. “This is my Penn State letter. There’s Hampton University. And there’s California College of the Arts,” he says, pausing to exchange high-fives with classmate Chanelle Gilbert, who also has a letter from CCA.
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