Ekaterina Senichkina

The article tells about the main trends in the modern and classical humanities views about the nature of creative activity, as well as its structural components. The article identifies the general directions in higher art educational process organization, and also gives psychological and pedagogical recommendations concerning work with artist students and their creative perception of nature development.

The author analyzes the phenomenon of a city and its image in culture and art, its role in art education. In the search of functions and purposes of city image depicting by artists for many centuries, the author comes to positive conclusions about the development of creative and cognitive activity as a part of educational and individual artistic processes. Work in the cityscape genre designates professional ideological reference points in the student’s creativity. A special place in the genre of cityscape is given to the studying of architecture history and its styles, represented in modern urban space. The author also identifies artistic practical skills of young artists developed during cityscape drawing.

The article includes basic principles of artistic, creative and educational methods of the plein air work for the art students, describes some features of graphic cityscapes painting.The author argues that plein air practice as a part of higher educational process is a good way in the development of artistic personality. The author also describes potential difficulties of the plein air process pedagogical organization and practical artistic mistakes of students work and their perception of nature.