ART 305-01, Intermediate & Advanced Painting, Fall 2005

Abstract

This class is an opportunity to customize your influences. It’s a chance to ilk out paths and options but also to experiment with making a body of work that stands on your own ideas (an experiment that helps you step outside of your boundaries is the most valuable one.) You’ll have many opportunities for such experiments this semester. I want to see you take risks and dare to make substantive changes in both paintings in progress and in your attitudes, ideas and explorations surrounding the making of art.

Here’s your chance to devote energy to discovering an inner logic for your work. You will attempt to build believability and a sense of necessity into the way it looks. All artists deal with their works’ (or any given works) relationship to the traditions of painting & the contemporaries of art making. What particular lineage are you interested in working in – or will you form a hybrid…or work in opposition to…or expose…or critique…? Where do you locate yourself in the art of others, no matter how different stylistically? Art is complex and endlessly varied. We live in a period of great freedom with no dominant ISM. At the beginning of this new century there is a great deal of reevaluation going on as to how painting can continue to operate as a meaningful form. Questions as to how it functions, how it interacts with its audience and how it embodies content are all around us. The above issues will be deeply involved in our discussions. And while you are delving into all of this – your actual skills in handling materials are growing. You’ll be experimenting with scale, format, and color as well as paint application. Sophistication and precision in the making and hands on aspect of your art grow along with your use of language to critique your own efforts as well as the rest of the art that you see around you. You are finding a voice and honing the skills that allow it to be heard—presenting a vision with the means that allow it to be seen.

A major focus of this class is connecting process & content. Now you have a relationship & working knowledge of paint. You have begun to understand what the medium is capable of. Here’s your chance to connect it with what motivates you both physically and mentally. You will learn ways to research these motivations and research their possible manifestations. The class will be based on 6 completed assignments including a sketchbook holding 35 paint studies and 4sets of Artist Research & 4 event descriptions. Finished paintings will be due on the day of the critique (see class schedule) Assignments can be interpreted loosely or strictly and executed in a representational, non-objective, abstract, or unconventional mode.