At Webb, the study of form doesn’t stop at the hull.

Each year, students in Professor Richard Harris’s Western Culture II course set aside their drafting tools and take on a challenge that has little to do with engineering, and everything to do with seeing. The assignment: recreate a painting or illustration, stroke by stroke.

For many, it’s the first art class they’ve ever taken. Few arrive with any formal training. What they bring instead is the habit of precision that runs through everything at Webb –  the patience to work a problem until it resolves, the discipline to get a detail exactly right. Applied to a canvas, that instinct produces work of remarkable care: brushwork studied closely, proportion measured and re-measured, color matched with the same rigor a student might bring to a stability calculation.

The result is that the paintings are good, often startlingly so. Visitors are surprised. The students are frequently more surprised than anyone.

But the point isn’t the finished canvas. To reproduce a work of art, you first have to truly look at it – to understand how a composition holds together, how one color shifts the temperature of the one beside it, how an artist arrived at a decision no formula could have produced. Students spend weeks with a single image, and come away seeing it in a way no gallery visit could teach.

Classes have taken on the Post-Impressionists and the movements that followed, working across a wide range of styles and techniques.

A Word About the Class of 2027

The seniors graduating this year took on this project as underclassmen, and the work they produced has stayed with people. By some accounts, it stands among the strongest the course has seen. A class that arrived with almost no formal training and turned out canvases that made visitors stop mid-conversation.

Judge for yourself.