Each semester, students in Aaron Putt’s “Introduction to Painting and Drawing” class strive to create photorealistic drawings of crumpled pieces of paper. The assignment focuses on refining technical skills like shading and color value.
Putt, assistant teaching professor of Integrated Visual Arts in the Department of Film and Media, added a few new wrinkles to the class last fall, as part of the Creative Conscience Project, a partnership between visual arts and Emory Center for Ethics.
He asked each student to write a note on a piece of paper “connected to memories or reflections about someone in their lives,” before balling up it up.
And he instructed them to include intimate objects from their lives in the drawing to create a still-life montage: a family recipe, passed down through generations. A flower someone gave them. A seashell from a memorable vacation.
“We had discussions about compassion as it related to a specific object,” says Putt, “but also about how ideas can be expressed visually and how a visual language can be created to express a complex idea.”
The Creative Conscience Project is part of Emory College of Arts and Sciences’ Year of Compassion, featuring events dedicated to promoting empathy, healing and human connection.
The project adds student voices to this larger public dialogue, says Dana Haugaard, director of visual arts and associate teaching professor.
“They’re using the skills they’re honing to make arguments and present ideas. Only in this case, the final result isn’t an academic paper; it’s a work of art. And that can be just as effective in starting some really important conversations.” Classes led by visiting assistant professor Larkin Ford and instructor Sara Ghazi Asadollahi also took part.
These artistic “conversations” are on view in an exhibit titled “Between Shadow and Light: Artwork on Compassion” in Emory Center for Ethics’ hallway gallery. The exhibit, to remain on display through January 2027, features drawings, paintings and photographs by 13 students from compassion-focused visual arts classes. The project is supported by the Emory Center for Ethics.
The plan is to repeat this process every year, culminating in exhibits focused on themes such as humility, curiosity, patience and honesty.
“The Creative Conscience Project represents an opportunity to teach students that they need not limit their considerations of these values to philosophy classes and spiritual settings,” says John Lysaker, director of Emory Center for Ethics and William R. Kenan University Professor. “Instead, they can be doing character work wherever they go. It’s simply another way for the wise heart to seek knowledge.”
The process of making art, he adds, lends itself particularly well to this journey.
Compassionate acts
That was the experience of Rigo Mendoza, a senior majoring in biology and minoring in sociology.
“On the very first day of class,” says Mendoza, “Professor Putt told us, ‘Be ready to learn a lot about yourself.’”
Mendoza’s still-life drawing, "A Final Act of Love: Recreating my Crocheted Blanket" is part of the exhibit. It features a rolled-up afghan blanket crocheted by someone who was close to him.
Getting the shading and contrast right was challenging, he says. But taking up pencil and charcoal to re-create the blanket in painstaking detail helped him to see it differently.
“When I was presenting this to my class,” Mendoza recalls, a fellow student who crochets “was like, ‘Wow. This person must really care about you,’ because of the amount of detail in each square of the blanket.
“And then Professor Putt said that, in making this drawing, I finally got to see how much time and effort it took to make the blanket, and that, in a way, I was taking part in that process, too — weaving and creating it, only with charcoal.
“You know, there are certain things some professors say that I’ll never forget, and that’s one of them,” Mendoza adds.
“The act of making the blanket, giving it to someone, my receiving it and then taking it and making this drawing; it’s just kind of like a cascade of compassionate actions,” he says.
“Compassion is often viewed as an emotion,” says Brendan Ozawa-de Silva, associate teaching professor at the Emory Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics. “But it’s an emotion that compels us to act — and making art can certainly be one action-oriented response.”
Once the compassion floodgates opened, Mendoza saw it in his older work as well, including the first painting he made, back in high school.
“It was two people on a boat at sunset,” he says. “The obvious choice was to include, like, a male and a female, but I painted two men.” He now views this decision as a way of expressing compassion for himself as someone subconsciously questioning his sexuality.
Paintings, drawings and other artistic media are powerful means of communication, says Laura Asherman, director of the Ethics and the Arts program at Emory Center of Ethics. A filmmaker and a sculptor herself, Asherman visited participating art classes early in the fall semester to get students started with a guided exercise.
“This project elevates visual art as language to communicate about concepts, like compassion, that could otherwise feel abstract,” she says. “At the same time, it’s encouraging students to think more deeply about their lives.”
Retracing family history
Art has always been an important language for Isha Parashar, a first-year student majoring in sociology and Spanish.
“I mean, if I had a superpower, it would be to learn every language in the world,” she says, “so visual art is just another form of that, like music or Spanish.”
It was a compassionate message from childhood that inspired Parashar to create her crumpled-paper still-life, entitled "I Have to Leave (I Hope I See You Soon)," which is featured in the exhibit.
Her drawing depicts a sticky note Parashar’s brother wrote for her when he was 14 and she was eight.
While the two are extremely close, growing up, they spent some time apart. In the message, he writes that he was sorry to have missed her during a family visit.
She had pinned the note to a bulletin board in her home but says she didn’t give it much thought. Looking more closely at it, as she copied every letter for her drawing, forced her to consider her brother’s perspective in a new way.
“I was, you know, obviously trying to copy his handwriting,” she recalls, “and I thought, ‘Oh, this is a kid's handwriting.’”
The process flooded Parashar with compassion for both of them — a cathartic experience she never expected from a painting and drawing class.
Compassion is contagious
Art holds the power to evoke strong empathetic feelings, says Ozawa de-Silva, both in the artist and in the viewer. This power is not just an artistic phenomenon, he adds.
“Because of this long evolutionary history of compassion, we are social animals who are biologically conditioned to resonate with each other,” he says. “So, when someone’s sad, you feel a bit sad; when someone’s happy, it tends to rub off. We mirror each other.
“Teams of athletes do this. Dancers who are dancing with a partner do this,” he says. “And I think that’s at the heart of compassion.”
As Mendoza continues making art inspired by his own life, that resonance continues.
“It just has me thinking about how love is like energy,” he says. “It cannot be created or destroyed; it just takes a new form. And I think that what keeps changing that form is the act of giving.”