I have recently returned to school, at the University of Victoria, as a continuing education student enrolled in the Fine Arts Diploma Program (FADP).

The impetus for this was two fold… First, after a 3 – 4 year professional development stint, where I attained my Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM), my PRINCE2 Practitioner and my Project Management Professional (PMP) designations, I was ready to study something other than Project Management. Secondly, my honeymoon in New York City left me once more passionate about my high school career aspiration which was to be an Architect. So the FADP seemed like a good place to start, 10 credit courses to graduate and possibly get me prepared to create an Architecture portfolio for entry into a Masters of Architecture program (Uvic has no such program)… all this without having to give up my day job and much needed income… FANTASTIC!

The one and and only required course for the FADP is FA101 “The Creative Being”; billed as an investigation of the creative process, the course had me more intrigued than your standard FA100 history, movements, recognize this slide type course. Initially I had concerns that the course wasn’t rigorous enough in it’s academic approach, I after all was a B.Comm. and as far as I could tell there was no testing to determine if we’d even read the course material… however I was slowly won over to the epistemological journey that was clearly, in hindsight, a wonderful journey in the way of learning by doing.

What follows is a collection of bi-weekly “creative acts”, the other weeks the exercises were more in the creative reflection side of things.

My first creative act: I took my collection of architectural photos and created a slide show set to music… “Architecture I Have Known”… Aperture and iMovie were the tools of choice.

Next up and sort of on the embarrassing side of things, we were instructed to go forth into the city and perform public art live… in front of an audience! Oh dear! Here’s my improvisational mime incorporating civic art.

Third, the dreaded group project! All in all it worked out pretty well, a little Madonna, a little super-hero spandex… what could possibly go wrong?

And last but not least, my final creative act of the semester, “An Examination of Time”, a mind twister mashup on multiple dimensions!

FA101 was a great introduction to the Fine Arts faculty, and its learn by doing approach was fantastically refreshing for a 1st year arts course… I look forward to my next course this summer FA350 “An Introduction to Architecture: Theory and Practice” as this will be the first architecturally specific course I’ve ever taken… after over 12 years of thinking about it!