The Relationship Between Art Education And The Development Of College Students' Creative Abilities

As human civilization has been in progress through millennia, man is gardually able to utilize his scientific knowledge to understand the outer world, and also comprehend his own spiritual domain by means of art. Retrospectively, from the choreography of ancient inhabitants to exorcize demons and hail the deity, to miscellaneous modern art genres, art, endowed with the most powerful while sincere characteristics, epitomizes the direct demands derived from human life, and also delineates human's invigorating creation instincts. Therefore, the value of art education is not only focused on the improvement of individual aesthetic values, but also, as is more important, it can trigger off individual's creative abilities resulted from such dynamic elements as artistic perception, artistic emotions, artistic imagination,etc. emerged in the wake of boosting one's intrinsic instincts. Art education plays a potential incentive role in the course of nurturing college students' creative abilities.This paper is based on related theories regarding art science, pedagogy, brain science and psychology, written in an effort to give a thorough investigation on the relationship between art education and nurturing college students' creative abilities. In the respect of epistemology, art reflects the objective world by the very azimuth of 'image'. It is not just an image-creating representative activity, but rather a cognitive one with free imagination accompanied by emotional experiences in the process of individual's life in materializing his will. By researching in the field of cognitive maneuver of art, the constitution, features, processes,and laws of art thinking, as well as the ties between art and science, a conclusion is to be made as follows: Art thinking is a genre of creative image thinking.College students have reaped considerable progress in many respects of thinking abilities, but higher education concentrates more on the studies and development of logical forms, thus the corresponding training on non-logical thinking abilities such as image thinking, intuition thinking, etc. is highly insufficient. As a result, the lack of imagination and standardization of thinking pose as an obstacle to college students' creative abilities. The 4^th Chapter of this paper gives a detailed explanation of art education's positive effect on the improvement of college students' creative abilities, i.e. the ability of artistic perception is helpful to foster students' acute observation ability; artistic emotional power is the internal driving force on nurturing innovative abilities while artistic imagination brings upheaval of the creative abilities; art education helps students develop their own abilities of image thinking, intuition thinking and inspiration thinking; also, art education shores up students' innovative personality establishment. What's more, different art genres play different roles in fostering students' creative abilities.America's art education ensures its prominence among the peers in the globe; the understanding and utilization of the natures and advantages of the nation's art education for reference is beneficial to improving China's art education performance.The 5^th Chapter of this essay offers personal opinions on how to proceed with art education in regular institutes of higher learning effectively based on the introduction of the status quo of current art education from both China and the United States, and also on the comparison of art education between the two countries. It is expected that this paper be of referential value in the respect of the implementation of art quality education in domestic colleges and universities and the development of college students' creative abilities.