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How Drawing can Inform and Lead our Painting.

In this online 8-week course we will become familiar with drawing as an essential part of a painting practice.

Working from still life, for the first four weeks we will use drawing as a way of understanding the motif, using different media to gather different kinds of information.  Our investigations result in creating an intimate relationship to the motif. How do I use drawing as a way of gathering experience and understanding of the visual world?  In addition, how does drawing support and strengthen the composition?

During the second four weeks we will use drawing as a way of exploring our own creative temperaments and ways of working. How do I enjoy marking?  How do I need to mark? How fast? How slow?  With what materials? How intuitively do I work?  How analytically? How much accident and how much control? Do I plan my compositions or do I discover them — or both?  What is my relationship to the tactile and felt?

And how does all of this translate into my painting?

First Four Weeks: Exploring the Outer Motif of Still Life

Week 1: Geometry and Measuring.  We will use line to become familiar with the proportions and shapes of the objects and spaces between them – focusing on measuring as a way of becoming intimate with the motif.

Week 2: Value Relationships.  We will explore the range of values in our given situation, and begin to introduce the aspect of tactile projection as a way of strengthening our engagement.

Week 3: Simplifying the Situation. Using ink wash we will simplify the values in order to move directly into the larger dynamic of the still life situation.

Week 4: Composition – Thumbnails & Moving Form Around. We will explore different ways of handling composition as a way of clarifying our vision and our visual idea.

Second Four Weeks: Exploring Our Inner Engagement with Still Life

Week 5: Marking as Seeing, exploring form and space.  What is my relationship to the physical structures of what I am looking at? What is my relationship to the sense of space surrounding them? How can I move back and forth between engaging with form and space as a way of moving more fully into the still life?

Week 6: Feeling in the Dark, exploring tactile projection.  What might it be like to draw in the dark, marking as a way of “feeling the form”?

Week 7: Layering.  Working with both charcoal and ink wash we will explore the possibilities of shifting our ways of marking, investigating our own touch and tempo.

Week 8: Finding and Losing and Finding.  Working with mixed media – charcoal, ink wash, black and white acrylic – we will explore aspects of forming and obliterating, making and losing, as a means of creating deeper form and experience.

A Members Only Mighty Networks Group will be provided for posting our work, for supportive community and creative sharing.

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