No Class Sunday, January 25

Course Description

“Greatness can only be rightly estimated when minuteness is justly reverenced. Greatness is the aggregation of minuteness; nor can its sublimity be felt truthfully by any mind unaccustomed to the affectionate watching of what is least.”
– John Ruskin’s “Modern Painters Volume V: Completing the Work and Containing”

In this virtual Drawing Marathon we will explore this assertion by John Ruskin and how it manifests in our own work. We will be looking at the “least” of things, the smallest of ideas, and how those quiet gestures in and of themselves are significant. In doing so, we find a greater authenticity to our ambition for works of magnitude and complexity. We will be exploring in depth the art of the sketchbook in order to plant and germinate seeds, and grow them into a larger project.

Students will be asked to draw with determination, ambition and curiosity for the full eight hours every day. Each day will be a search, perhaps a struggle, and a discovery. We will work from internal sources (intuition, sensation, stream of consciousness) as well as external sources (drawing from the work of other artists, from each other, and from the space around us).

Course Outline

The first week of this marathon we will dive deeply into the sketchbook. The sketchbook is a refuge: a place to unload, attune, try, and err. In it, we tap into the unending stream of ideas lying inside of the hand, mind and eyes. In this permissive space, we uncover images that need to be realized. During this time, we will alternate between a form of stream of consciousness drawing and rules-based prompts. The themes explored in these prompts may include the following:
+ Repetition
+ Resistance
+ Timed drawings
+ Limited mark drawings
+ Drawing as ground-making
+ Drawing as figure-making
+ Figure vs. Ground
+ Making our own coloring books
+ Working from art history as source (Transcription)

In the second week of the marathon we pull from the sketchbook as a source for a final series of drawings that intend to clarify, magnify, challenge or celebrate content generated in week 1. In this way we are building our work from scratch, from the ground up. During class I will often read to the group from poetry, artist journals, essays, and criticism. There will be regular 1:1 meetings with me in the breakout room. We will also share our work with each other daily, and
have group critiques.

When we look at artistic context we will look at a wide variety of genres. Artists we look at may include: Paul Klee, Eva Hesse early drawings, Albrecht Durer, Ree Morton, Dawn Clements, Daniel Johnston, Joanna Sternberg, Robert Crumb, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Roy Lichtenstein, Joseph Santore, Jennifer Bartlett, Bruce Connor, Henri Matisse and many others.

Course Syllabus