Painting away the blues:

It was another in a seemingly endless series of gray, rainy, cold April days, but Nancy Mitchnick was having none of it. The Rudolph Arnheim Lecturer on Studio Arts was instructing her class to use the resources at hand to change the weather – at least the weather inside the bustling classroom. The students in the introductory studio course “Painting 1” took their charge seriously and attacked their canvases with the brightest colors they could find, making bold, vibrant images. To the hip-swinging rhythm of Motown, the young painters turned an eternal winter into sudden spring, covering their small world – including their own clothes – with all the tints in the rainbow. Only some kind of canine good fortune kept Olivia, Mitchnick’s German shepherd, from becoming the “amazing painted dog.”