Back to School Update: Painting 213 - Formal and Conceptual Issues

This was my first second-year painting class. I was expecting that it would motivate me to spend more time with a brush in hand - there was some of that if we chose, but again the focus tended to be on concepts and contemporary art practices. We also did presentations on contemporary artists which I found helpful - I was shocked to see very few artists on any of the lists who actually use a brush and paint. I chose to present on Neo Rauch, an East German artist who has seemed to progress in the opposite trajectory of minimalism - an encouraging trend to my mind.
Our first assignment focussed on portraiture in contemporary art and required three portraits of an individual of our choice. Coincidentally, I had picked up a commemorative Scientific American issue on Albert Einstein a few weeks before. I've been interested in him as a enigmatic human being for a long time: a perfect subject for exploring portraiture. The piece on the left was a collaged caricature (using an old paperback biography that I was miraculously able to find in my storeroom). The middle piece was a take on his thought experiment elevator.

 The final piece was an impressionistic portrait on curved paper, intended to reference the implications his theories have had on our understanding of space.

 The next assignment was a collaboration with another student and required an interactive component. My young partner and I came to the realization that we both loved experiencing the outdoors and chose to do an installation which was an homage to the natural environment. I set up a plein air painting station (with pond water for water colour painting). There was a central top-lit hanging of squirrel-assisted art work. I have an area on our property where I hang art pieces and document their change - the squirrels are fascinated by it and contribute their changes - they must have the prettiest nests, but I have yet to find one. Mount St Piran is a fabulous hike to go on if you ever want to experience spontaneous interactive art - there are innumerable cairns on its rounded summit. I created a cairn building opportunity at the end of the exhibit. Interestingly, someone felt the need to destroy it (with apologies) - different than I expected, but made me smile. I also brought in an end of season flower pot - one of the hardest gardening tasks for me is cutting back plants that are trying desperately to survive into the winter despite our harsh climate.
Lucy created a beautiful cup of growing grass, made paper from leaves, and created a video of a forest. There was also an audio track of natural sound effects and leaves to be raked on the floor. Installation is generally not my favorite thing, but this worked well as a group project and the atmosphere was lovely if I do say so myself.





The third assignment was "colour: creating a mind-scape" and we were asked to look at different contemporary artists for inspiration. Damien Hirst's spot paintings got me thinking about how to create a colour "sampler" -  a study of colour that would give me the opportunity to experiment with combining warm and cool versions of the three primary colours. I also wanted to experiment with stretching canvas on plywood. In another life a lot of my work involved statistics, probability, and sampling - it was fun to flip back into that jargon and create a plan that I had to follow that involved a random selection of colour pairs and location on a 6X6 grid. It was  a very liberating experience that I think I may revisit in the future - it was wonderful to be able to play with the colours and not worry about the final product. The biggest challenge was sticking with the rules when the randomness forced me to do something that I didn't want to do.

The final assignment involved using materials of our choice to depict "place". I was bound and determined to actually paint a landscape. We had a list of contemporary artists to choose from for inspiration - once again I was disappointed to find not a single inspiring landscape artist on the list. My instructor later pointed me towards David Schnell who was very inspiring, but by that point I had my mind set on trying to portray this feeling of the "place" of landscape painting being broken in contemporary art. The idea was to paint a landscape breaking apart and the bits being carried away by ravens (in the little picture, a tiny bird is carrying away a fragment) - all in the presence of an absent observer.

In the end, I learned a lot from the course in how contemporary artists are depicting things like place, portraiture and colour etc. I did learn a few techniques which came from the choices I made - e.g. experimenting with colour, stretching canvas, and layering multiple spatial planes on a 2 dimensional surface - all I plan to do more of.