Teaching, teaching, teaching

Yesterday was the first day of crits for a Variable Topics in Drawing Project--a 300 level drawing class I teach at least once a year.  My students have worked on these mid to large sized collages for over a month at least, and they've done a wonderful job translating the still-life they set up into various interpretations of reality.  I asked them to think about how one might present multiple views of any given view of reality, and they embraced the challenge with gusto!

From the top: work by Marilyn Barr, Elizabeth Weiland, Sara Phillips, Scottie Bottenus, Ashley Jones and Ivana Beck.

Oh, I should say that these are all about 4'x5' in dimension.

Final/From Representation to Abstraction

I had a particularly strong beginning drawing class this semester.  They moved swiftly through all the usual drawings, finishing what is typically the final drawing a couple weeks early.  So we got to try out some higher level thinking for the last project.  They grappled with the potentially unwieldy and unlimited possibilities of turning facets of representation into abstraction.  From deeply rendered drawings of cork screws and car engines, tea kettles and chopsticks they made lovely and highly individual abstract charcoal drawings.  I was so pleased yesterday when I saw them all gathered together on the wall.

Maurice's drawing box

Maurice, one of my graduate students, is the owner of this fantastic drawing box.

Melting

An older drawing on paper--from Fall 2009.  I am seeing it anew of late though.  Of the pile of images made at that time this one has risen to the top.

I am back to writing syllabi (two down, one to go) and I'm hoping desperately to grab a few moments in the studio before the semester begins next week.  Maybe, just maybe.  Though realistically this notion will not happen.  As Alex is no longer in his summer program, Chris and I are back to balancing our work day with a lovely, energetic five year old who has just one week left until he begins kindergarten.  We go about our days normally, with an eye toward preparing for the start of all our schools.  But in some way we are all also waiting/dreading that moment when Alexander will disappear onto that school bus...which will then drive on down the road while I stand still, watching, no doubt feeling just about ready to implode.   

I am not sure how the above image turned into a post about me imploding.  But then if this blog is anything it is an attempt to see what happens when an ostensibly formal abstract image is placed right next to these lived (visual) moments of a life/our lives--a pile of orange carrots, a yellow school bus with black stripes, my son's red hair.

What does an abstract painter draw from life? In little orderly rows?

Dragonflies, of course.

Sketchbook page

"When I painted a chair recently, I noticed that I put the paint on indifferently, smoothly but without particular attention.  The results were satisfactory but not in any sense beautiful.  Does the attention in itself with which paint is applied in art actually change the effect of the paint?  Does the kind of consciousness with which we act determine the quality of our actions?  It would follow, if this were true, that the higher the degree of consciousness, the higher the quality of the art.  I think it likely.  Training in art is, then, a demand that students increase the consciousness with which they employ techniques that are, in themselves, ordinary."

Anne Truitt, p. 130-131 from Daybook

Drawing Marathon/Week 1

I teach a graduate class this semester called Drawing Marathon--we meet together all day Friday and Saturday for the first four weeks of the semester.
This past week, we wrestled with our looking--questioning habits of our hand as well as our eye.  We also opposed our tendencies in drawing--looking and identifying methods of thinking through drawing in the images set before us, and then purposefully working in opposition.
We began by building a contraption that was intentionally meant to be "too much."

Back to school

1. "Drawing is absolutely quintessential to knowing the self."   Richard Tuttle
2. "After Beuys left the Dusseldorf Academy in 1951, he commenced a period of isolation that resulted in one of the most remarkable outpourings of drawing in this century.  Beuys spent close to a decade elaborating a personal idiom, doing so almost entirely in the medium of drawing…Working in solitude in Dusseldorf, Beuys drew prodigiously: thousands of works on paper in oil, watercolor, and ink and pencil record the themes and ideas he was investigating.  The intensity with which Beuys worked during these years finds few equivalents in the art of his predecessors.  The analogies are to periods of crisis…"
Excerpt from essay Joseph Beuys: Life Drawing by Ann Temkin
3. "In 1966 Guston had an exhibition of his recent paintings and drawings at The Jewish Museum in New York.  At about the same time he stopped painting, and for the next two years concentrated on drawing.  He felt exhausted, drained of the creative energies that had sustained him through the early sixties paintings and the haunting, dark gouaches of 1963-1964.  Now he needed time for renewal.  But it was to be a period of anxiety, both personal and artistic: two years of struggle.
Within that two-year span he executed hundreds of drawings—“pure” drawings as he called them, as well as images of objects—in brush and ink or in charcoal.  Again feeling encumbered by the accumulated baggage of his experience, he turned once more to drawing, trying to reinvent the way to 'locate the mark.'"
Excerpt from essay The Drawings of Philip Guston by Magdalena Dabrowski
4. “I wrote the poems individually and then, after about a year, I found I wanted a bigger form, and then I was writing prose.  It expanded into this huge mongrel thing and I wondered if I might be going crazy when I was writing it.  Later I went back and looked at it.  I knew I had to find some kind of shape and form for it.  That was probably the most difficult thing I had to learn—how to shape the material—place three hundred pieces into an organic structure that seemed natural, and still juxtapose a gentle scene with something violent.  I think that was when I became interested in how a collage works.”
-Michael Ondaatje describing the genesis of his novel, Billy the Kid to interviewer Tom Barbash in the August 2007 issue of The Believer.

Today is my first day of teaching in about 8 months;  I cannot believe it really!  So today is a day of syllabus reading (hence the quotes, all from the tops of my syllabi), answering questions, talking about materials and getting them thinking about drawing (and some collage as well of course).  I teach three classes today--two beginning drawing classes and one intermediate drawing class called Variable Topics in Drawing.
I'm ready to be back--a bit calmer I think, more measured.  I do hope I can keep my equilibrium as the days pass.
(More studio pics soon--and this semester...more classroom pics I've determined!)

Alexander's drawing as of late...

Oh it has been awhile since I posted some of my son's artwork here, so perhaps you can forgive me for indulging in such shameless behavior today.

My husband and I converse (as only two art teachers and artists might) on how fascinating it is that advances in Alexander's work always happen overnight--literally.  One day he is making drawings that look a certain way and then the next day some new tendency arrives--fully formed and utterly captivating.  One such leap happened last Sunday in church.  I gave Alexander a sheet of the attendance pad because it has a blank back; of course HE preferred the lined front and proceeded to make the drawing in one go.  I recall very little of that sermon as I kept sneaking a peak at his progress...and thankfully was able to save it before he went a little too crazy with the poking holes phase of the drawing (an endlessly enjoyable church activity you know).

He received some peer affirmation at school the next day from all the little boys in his class; Chris found them hovered around Alex while he completed another version of his "bat castle" series.  He generously listened to and added all their suggestions and THEN allowed them all to demolish the drawing since it was on a dry erase board.  We wanted another for ouselves so the FOLLOWING day he came home with the second drawing you see here--for his dad and I to keep.

Today I Saw

I came across this blog today--and find the artist's (a woman named Jill Wignall) manner of combining drawing with everyday life and human connection utterly delightful and inspiring.   What a treasure it would be to receive one of these drawings in the mail!!!

Addendum to yesterday

On an earlier jaunt across campus to a unexpected meeting I thought I didn't want to attend (mostly because attending meant leaving the studio day yawning uninterrupted ahead of me) I gained some unexpected clarity about yesterday's/today's drawing. I sat down to jot a few notes prior to joining my fellow meeting-ers, lest I forget. I'll list them here, weird punctuation/line breaks/light blue ink and all:

looking at trees on my way to _____ noticing they are mostly just
punctuated w/ a leaf, here and
there, very sporadically, on the tips
for the most part.
and I realize
what seems important is not the
leaf itself but the fact that the
leaf punctuates, marks, identifies
the end of the branch, a twig.
marking a moment
marking a place
marking the intangible reality as a
way of making it tangible

much like my blue/red drawing

not making the moment
but marking of placeness

Drawing with blue and red

I began this drawing last Wednesday.

(I realize this is not the best of photos--so I will explain...and promise to post a better image when the drawing is complete.)

In sorting through the piles of collage material mounding all over my studio floor, I came across several pieces of paper--painted blue rather haphazardly on the front. I made them earlier this semester, and they were not to be used as images in and of themselves--but rather as color and texture for a wall-sized collage in progress. In their disuse however, they made their way to the bottom of my "blue" pile.

(I organize collage material in terms of color, and strangely I have a noticeable absence of purple--a color I cannot seem to bring myself to use much at all--in painting, drawing or collage.)

So I found these blue papers last week--and ended up being quite interested in their backsides. While these papers were drying--way back in September no doubt--their white backsides (their verso, eh) picked up residual ink from my studio floor--and an undulating, unpredictable, staggered periphery is the unexpected result on most of these papers. The one I chose to work with also has a squarish inset shape--again delineated by a staccato border. I do not know how that inset occurred.

I love the fact that residual mark left definitive shape and edge.
I love the fact that I MADE the shape and edge I just described--but I didn't know I'd made them until I happened upon the image last week. Indeed, discovering the paper felt like a delightful gift.

Now I know I've talked on this blog about not being able to really plan much of anything in my studio, but every so often I make an image that rather hands me it's definition right at the start. "This is what you will do." And then I go ahead and do THAT...whatever THAT happens to be. Oh, such clarity of direction is very, very rare, but last week I realized I had to take small pieces of red line (already made and nicely organized in my box of hand-made red lines labeled HUSKY) and rim the precarious edge of my blue tinged paper, a bit sporadically. So this is what I am doing, and I hope to finish the drawing tomorrow.

I don't know why I am doing this, but I know I must, and I really want to see what it all looks like in the end.