The University's School of Art professors were all fairly interesting. Part of it was no doubt due to spending a lot of time with them in much smaller classes. (I could barely see my Organic Chemistry professor from my seat in the huge lecture hall with hundreds of other students, and I don't think he ever dropped by the lab while I was there, leaving that kind of thing to the TA's. Conversely, each art class lasted 3 hours a day, multiple days a week, and usually had under 20 students each.)

The basic drawing professor was a stern fellow (rather than a woman, in Hallie's case) who had a great deal of contempt for a great many subjects. He was definitely a High Art minded fellow. Conversely, one of my favorite lecturers at the school was a guy who stressed that pretty much everything was art these days, that unless you get completely away from society you can't help but be surrounded by design for art's sake.

I found it odd that they all tried to recruit for their own mediums... I had a drawing teacher, a painting teacher and a sculpting teacher all assure me separately that their medium was the only "true" art. Drawing was what you did before you actually went about creating the real piece, for instance. Or painting is just imagining things, while sculpture is actually making them exist. Beyond that, they would just try to steer you towards more specific arts. I had one professor ask me if I had considered printmaking as a career. I had not.

So at one point I was going to turn some semi-autobiographical stuff into Hallie in school stories, but I think I quickly realized that it was all stuff like the Vizh/Hallie mythlands scenes in that it made nice stuff to flesh out a story, but it wasn't actually enough in itself to *be* a story... and without a real story idea, I never got around to using any of it.