This week we read Historic painting and Neo- Expressionism,  from Painting Today. As well as 95 Theses on Painting, 10 rules for Creative Projects, and Chuck Close on Creativity.

We had two podcasts, Kerry James Marshall and Molly Zuckerman Hartung.

The practice for this week was to do library and feild research, build studio plans, and work on painting from imagination.

The writing for this week was to write a Exegesis essay. I wrote on a passage from Neo- Expressionism that discussed why art in the 80s and today is so expressive of self.

On Wednesday Shaw gave a excellent lecture on expressionism and then we attended a Art Lecture Series with Susana Bloom. She is very interested in painting landscapes as expressive of here thoughts and feelings surrounding them.

This week helped my find my question for my project and I’m working on getting images picked for my project.

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.