Painting Workshop

The goal of Painting Workshop is to provide a serious and focused environment in which each of you can develop your ideas about painting. This course is an opportunity for you to sharpen your understanding of what painting is through pursuing your ideas, understanding how your ideas relate to historical and contemporary models, and understanding how your ideas relate to other modes of discourse and enquiry.

The vast majority of the course will consist of you painting. Relevant questions about and insights into painting come from the practice of painting. I will demonstrate techniques and discuss technical matters on request, but the course will not focus on the acquisition of traditional painting skills per se. It is fundamentally your process of painting that I am interested in. This process consists of all the decisions you make in the course of painting and how and why you make them. In examining your process--through painting, through looking, through reading, through writing, through reflecting--you will become a more sophisticated painter, more able to direct your energies at what really matters to you.

For the first couple of weeks, I'm going to ask you to do some exercises to establish that everyone is comfortable with the basic formal premises of Western painting, such as issues of design and spatial illusion. Concurrently, I will ask you to research artists' statements and develop a preliminary one for yourself. I will also ask you to weigh in on some of the ways that people have talked about painting in the twentieth century--are they accurate? Relevant?

The rest of the course will be painting, critiquing, discussing, and probably a little arguing. Notwithstanding that this is a painting course, drawing will be fundamental to everything that you do. I will ask you to draw constantly, and to draw as a means of generating and clarifying ideas for painting.

The workload will be heavy. This is our highest level painting class, and I expect that you are all here because you want to be and because you are genuinely interested in pushing your experience of painting. Therefore, the homework load is going to be substantial. I will expect a minimum of eight hours per weekend painting, in addition to any reading, research, or looking that you need to do. I also want to spend quite a bit of time looking at what is available to us in Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. There is absolutely no replacing what it feels like to see the real thing.

I expect that many of you will want to experiment with a variety of materials, and I encourage you to do so. There is no requirement that you work with any specific materials, only that you pay close attention to how what you choose to work with works. The school store has a variety of paints and canvases, and you can also buy supplies at art stores in Rochester and Syracuse.

The thing I care about most is that you treat this course in a professional manner. If you engage your intellect, open your eyes and visually devour everything you can get your hands on, and paint constantly, you will make substantial work.