As I was sick through the whole week of week 4 I’ll give you everything I learned while missing class.

This week we read Painting Today: the global scene, Western Traditions, and The Figure. As well as The Creative Copy PDF and watched John Berger’s Ways of seeing 1972 podcast. There was a Artist lecture posted of Hanneline Rogeberg.

We were supposed to practice the figure and ground, atmospheric perspective, painting skin, and working from a model. That was also the theory for the week. I not only missed the figure drawing portion of Monday but the critique of my creative copies for this week. I also missed the artist lecture of Rodrigo Valenzuela. I’m going to do the figure drawing Wednesday session week 6 instead.

I did manage to make it to seminar so that was nice and when I wrote my paper I was taking a lot of prescription meds, and it turned out, i made more connections with the readings of the week than I had initially made when I first read it. which just means I’ve made connections I didn’t know I had made. So that was my most surprising thing to learn this week. After a week off being sick and trying to heal my brain was still thinking about what I had read and was processing that information into something I didn’t even know I was thinking about. It gives me some ideas for my final project.

I’ll be posting the work I missed soon I just was too sick to even work on it and I’m still healing. It’ll be up by the end of Monday.

List the readings, video, podcast, art lecture. This week’s readings were Painting Today: still life, and Life and Death, and Thierry de Duve, Nahum Tevet: Works on Glass, and Amy Sillman’s On Color. We also had a video of Thierry de Duve at Evergreen Art Lecture series in 2015.

What did you learn from these texts? In Death and life, it talks about how painting about death can help us mourn and that beauty can help us with lose. pg 278. That there is a harmony and beauty in death and that today our fascination with death is in everything, our tv shows, books, art, and photography. In On Color, it talks about the root of the word color in Greek, pharmakon- which means color, drug, poison, remedy, talisman, cosmetic, and intoxicant. About how we are all obsessed with buying art supplies, artist I mean, and that we are like scientist who don’t wear the proper protection for experimenting. All together I got a sense that we are experimenting and experiencing art through our feelings and emotions and that it helps us cope with life.

List what we covered in practice this week. What did we do in studio workshop, what was the assignment? Practice this week was to draw and paint from observation, to reproduce paintings, to make stretcher bars and learn how to use a chop saw. We also worked on writing essays and working as a group.

What did you learn from practice? The painting and drawing from observation helped with perspective and getting a sense of the mass and shape of a object. Reproducing paintings was interesting, almost like a conversation with someone far away through cans on a string. The work in the wood-shop was fun and it’s nice to know that the shop is open for us to use.

Give a couple of examples of how they inform each other? I feel like the work in the wood-shop was like a new experience and a new experiment for us and it was pretty reflective of the readings. The work with the oil paints and using them for the first time was very interesting and the tactile experience of them was reflective of Amy Stillman’s view of them in On Color.

List and define in your own words, 5 important terms/concepts you learned this week. 

Pathos-sadness, evoking of the feeling of sadness or pity

Tactility- texture, surface, feel

echos- a reflection of something, a memory, the past repeating

Authentic- real, original,

Forgery- a copy of that is identical but not the original

List 5 skills you learned this week.

 how to use a chop saw, how to build a stretcher bar, how to paint with oils, how to glaze with oils, and how to write a ekphrastic essay.

What was new and exciting? I enjoyed painting with oils and working on that, and I also enjoyed working in the studio and discussing how we achieved things in our work.

Where did you put your best effort? What did you do that you feel good about? It could be a drawing or time management or participated in class discussion, etc. I feel like my best effort was either in using a saw for the first time and building stretcher bars, or in producing two reproductions that look alike the original but have a bit of conversation with the artist, because I have reproduced art before but never had a conversation with the artist or what the artwork was doing. I found it helpful to think about it like I was asking her what she did and like she was next to me talking to me about her memory of the place.

What do you need to work of for next week? Where do you need to focus your efforts? It could be getting reading done ahead of time, allowing for more time for studio homework, arriving to class on time, etc. I feel like I worked pretty well this week and I look forward to perfecting what I did and remembering to bring everything I need for class with me.

What you want to get out of next week? I look forward to the glazing replications and I hope I can narrow down my grammatical mistakes in my paper.

 Two artist I’m looking into: Francesco Masnata numbers 53 and 54 in Painting today. and Gerhard Richter numbers 51 and 52 in painting today. I’m digging the colors and wispieness of the paintings on these pages.

List the readings, video, podcast, art lecture. Painting today introduction and chapter 9 landscape, and What is painting? Introduction and chapter 1, Stanley Whitney Podcast and video, and the artist lecture was Christopher Paul Jordan.
What did you learn from these texts? The Painting today talks more about artist work and comparing between different artist, where as the What is Painting? talks more about paint as a medium and technique artist used to get certain brush strokes and why they wouldn’t want brush strokes. The Stanley Whitney podcast and video both mostly talk about his style, why he paints the way he does, and why he didn’t want to participate in political art. He talks about the relationship between things and colors.
List what we covered in practice this week. What did we do in studio workshop, what was the assignment? In practice we used charcoal and white and black acrylic to paint still life and worked on painting and drawing what we see with the three levels of value. We also set up our studio space and worked on talking about art with a set vocabulary and learning that vocabulary.
What did you learn from practice? I learned the consistency I like to work with acrylic in, a little watered down but not a wet wash, and how to frame still life so that everything you see fits in the frame.

Give a couple of examples of how they inform each other? So, the practice with value and how shades of black and white relate to each other directly related to what the author was talking about in What is Painting? and how paint is visceral and how you represent an object in still life or landscape was more talked about in Painting today. I took from What is Painting? a new found look at how oil paint works, because I have never worked with it, so now I can go into painting knowing a little more about how the paint itself works.

List and define in your own words, 5 important terms/concepts you learned this week.
Gesture- the movement of the artist hand showed through the work, usually ends up suggesting movement.
Process-the process a artist uses to make work is their process, like when a artist likes the room to be completely silent, or music playing, to get in the right head space to make their work. It could also be the way they treat a canvas or medium during the time they make a piece.
Stylized- so some artist don’t have a style, or the way their art looks different from others, like big eyes and Tim Burton, but to stylize or for something to be stylized means it can be made to look a certain way or replicate a style of art. Like painting something with the style of Disney.
Ego- The Ego is one of the main drives for humans. Its a persons self- esteem or self- confidence, or even self- worth. Ego in a painting can mean the artist put their personality into a painting so much it  says something about them.
Movement- the way a brush moves on a surface with so much gesture it creates a sense that the subject is alive and moving.

List 5 skills you learned this week. Acrylic medium use, like how to mix paint, how to apply paint, how to blend and work with acrylic. How to discuss and find similarities and differences across different art, artist, and writings. How to take notes while others are discussing and still pay attention. Time management, and food prep, I pack my lunch ahead of time so I’m not running late.

What was new and exciting? I had never worked with acrylics in a still life setting and found it much like how you use charcoal but without the sounds and feeling of charcoal. I don’t like to use charcoal, so I enjoyed getting the same effect but without the discomfort of using a medium I don’t care for. I’ve never painting something with acrylic that looks as good as the sketch we did on Monday.

Where did you put your best effort? What did you do that you feel good about? It could be a drawing or time management or participated in class discussion, etc. I really tried to use the charcoal and get everything correctly proportioned in the frame, and then I just blindly went for it with the acrylic. I feel good about the results.

What do you need to work of for next week? Where do you need to focus your efforts? It could be getting reading done ahead of time, allowing for more time for studio homework, arriving to class on time, etc. I really need to get in the studio and use oils. As of Saturday, this week, I haven’t and I’m looking forward to blindly stepping into the old master’s shoes. I think I’m doing good on the other homework and getting it done early.

What you want to get out of next week? I want to paint more. I want to learn more about oil paints and how to use them and what to use them on.