Students investigate how major artists applied a range of approaches to abstraction to their work in the visual arts. Each class (or sometimes pair of classes) in the 6-session series explores a different artistic perspective, which students apply to their own art primarily using two-dimensional media and techniques such as drawing, painting, simple printmaking, and collage.
- Formal visual language focuses on the elements of art and the principles of design. Working on a variety of picture planes, students use a range of media to explore line, shape, value, space, and texture in works investigating balance, contrast, emphasis, pattern, rhythm and movement, and unity.
- Meaningful color delves into how artists use the connections and relationships between color and meaning to make personal statements in their work. Students create and use their own color proposals.
- Systematic deconstruction distills observed subjects to their essence. Students use subtraction, simplification, distortion, and exaggeration to explore essential qualities in a series of small works.
- Interpreting words and emotions visually explores how students can develop their own expressions of these elements and apply them to work created in class and beyond.
- Personal visual language is surveyed through an examination of the work of artists such as Charles Burchfield and Hilma af Klint. Students begin to develop their own personal language and experiment with its use in their work.
Works created in class may be complete in their own right or used as studies or maquettes for further work in students’ chosen media, which may include painting, embroidery, mixed-media, jewelry and metalsmithing, mosaics, quilting, printmaking or other areas of expertise.
Some shared supplies provided; a supply list may be downloaded from this page no later than 2 weeks prior to the first session.
Instructor: Sallye Mahan-Cox
6 sessions; 2.5 hours each
