Courses and Musings
July was a full month! I am thrilled to say I have a new stamina and working schedule from being enrolled in a 6 week intensive this summer with honestly fantastic instruction. I am am part of the future graduating cohort of 2025 for a Master of Studio Art at the Florence Academy.
The stimulation of being with instructors and fellow students seeking to work from nature felt like an oxygen boost for my artist soul.
It was interesting to throw on my student hat again. I felt the need to pause what I knew, slow down, break down information, put aside what is inspiring, and focus on the exercises at hand. And may I say, as someone who desires inspiration to work this was a challenging mental game, ha. The outcome is not the masterpieces of my dreams, which I believe is a common misconception among students of art. We all want to see work in the present as the master we hope to become, but the reality is that there is a mountain to hike to reach this point of understanding. To me, being in a class is about a space to mindfully yet rapidly create what the exercise demands, and then do everything you can not to hide from the issues and failings you find in your own method during the exercise. This is where having gracious and serious instruction is so helpful. I’m very grateful that while these 6 weeks felt similar to boot camp, it also allowed me to see where weaknesses with a kind group of folks. The overall aim of the course is to help the students experience certain drawing and painting practices and therefore embody them and their lessons for our own students.
Me, I left with a list of things I change in the exercises themselves for my students and for myself to repeat the exercises. I also really benefitted from the lectures and types of critiques I received. My dexterity in my hands and shoulders is improving again. And I discovered a vast amount of online resources and books I’ll be using for my own growth and as tools to share with my students.
Transparency in teaching is something I believe in maintaining. Meaning, we are all typically striving to grow. The pitfall of artistic practice can be perfection versus the understanding that everything we create is a simulation, reflection, or symbol of the subjects. Perfectionism is more than a little off-putting to students. And balance to our artistic pursuits is a huge part of the growth journey. My aim is to be an authentic teacher who is able to explain the goal of learning visual science and artistic representation without crushing the soul of artists. The goal, in my opinion, is not to copy “thing thing” perfectly, but to convey it honestly…. and honestly will have variation and interpretation in how a subject is conveyed while carrying strongly the tools of the visual realm. Which are proportion, value, composition, color, and edge quality.
A large part of studying to work from observation, or drawing and painting naturalistically, is choosing a process and school of thinking that works for you. There are many methods. During this course, I was most surprised to see myself transitioning from one school of thought and beginning to sense the need to integrate another school of thinking about form and painting. This may sound silly, but for myself, I have always aimed to work in a way reflected by rendering at the end of the process and I am now beginning to integrate rendering some areas in my work at the start of the process. I am excited about this because I believe it to be a sign of evolving processes and potential new work I’ll really enjoy creating. I also think being able to utilize both types of processes will allow for more simple yet well-stated drawings and more potential in alla prima painting.
here is what I mean…
To see what I mean, look at this painting to the left. While it is still in process, I believe you can tell I sculpted the lights first by using a first-phase shadow value in the entire shadow areas just barely darker than the imprimatur. Then, tested the values for the dark halftones and shadow lines, as dark as I could believe them to be while looking for hard and soft edges in the shadows. Now I will work where on lightening and warming areas of the shadows a bit to create more transitioning dark halftones. Then I’ll return to highlights and areas of challenging reflections that are slightly lighter than the darkest halftones and areas of reflecting rim lights in areas of contours on the small bottle.
So interestingly, to me, while the processes of rendering at the end verses rendering and the beginning seem at odds with one another as far as process, I think they aren’t. I think both skills allow the artist to work how the subject is speaking to them and provide more options.
To conclude, you might have guessed this is my favorite piece from the intensive, simply because of the experimentation process I encountered and the beginning of a shift in my understanding of painting that I hope will bring on the best kind of frustration and a good bit of fun painting.