This week we read Painting Today: Chapters on Abstraction, Photographic, and Post-Feminism. As well as pdfs of Shutz-Sillman interview. With the podcasts TJ Clark on Rembrandt.
The theory for this week was to focus on the figure/ground relationship, form, fracture, and our creative copy this week of a body.
In the studio practice for the week we drew and painted a figure from observation and from a photograph. We continued with our reproductions, prepared alternative surfaces to work on, and experimented with surface.
My creative copy for the week was a copy of Frank Aurbach’s head of Catherine.
I wrote a response to Val for her essay.
Now that I have everything we did this week wrote out lets talk about what I got out of this week. For the readings I found the chapters on abstraction the most helpful when I was thinking about my upcoming project. I’ve been thinking about abstract realism for my project and the chapters from this week and week 6 were very helpful in putting that in theoretical terms for me. I didn’t really have words for what I was thinking about before reading these. I also found it interesting why artist work or don’t work from photos and the reasoning behind doing something is very interesting for me. It’s like I might make something because I like the color and the real meaning could be something much deeper I wasn’t aware I was thinking about until I finish something.
For the studio work I found using a thumbnail sketch for the final to be very useful and I do intent to use that again in the future.
I’ve been thinking about my upcoming project a lot this weekend and I’m pretty sure I have a good start so I’m looking forward to that.
I want to work from life more.