ABSTRACTION AS DISCOVERY, PART TWO, 2020

This course is in many ways an advanced foundations course. Students are exposed to working directly with the formal elements of a painting, such as line, shape, form, color, edge, texture, paint handling, and composition. Because the painting necessarily goes through many transformations during the course, students becomes directly familiar with painting as a flexible and ceaselessly changeable medium.

In Part Two, Jordan explores possibilities not covered during Part One, such as a set palette, rhythmic marking, and “blind painting”.

Jordan gives demonstrations of various aspects of the journey into non-representational abstraction, looking at examples from Modern Abstract masters such as de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, and discussing writings from his teacher, Patrick Ahearne, in reference to the exploration.

A familiarity with the process of painting in its more physically dense and muscular aspects gives the student a context and experience to draw upon no matter what their future direction, abstract or representational, from observation or imagination or memory.

Painting, as an open-ended form of discovery, becomes a vehicle for inner exploration and a metaphor for living. In this way, Abstraction as Discovery becomes a foundation course for an understanding of painting as a life practice and a long-term journey.