Art 3043 | Figurative Painting
Figurative Painting is an introduction into painting the figure, a continuation of ART 2013 to further develop skills in use of the medium and formal organization of subject matter in painting.
Below are descriptions of some of the assignments in the course with student work examples.
Mass and Linear Gesture
Objectives:
- Represent the figure with confidence and spontaneity, creating compositions that are energetic and dynamic.
- Manipulate tone and color to create space and reveal form.
- Execute multiple works that express movement through unique and responsive mark-making.
Materials: Viewfinder, oil paints, mineral spirits, galkyd medium, round brushes, palette knives on stretched, gessoed
26"×40" Stonehenge
After Degas-Reductive Value
Objectives:
- Represent the figure with confidence and spontaneity, creating compositions that are energetic and dynamic.
- Manipulate tone and color to create space and reveal form.
- Execute multiple works that express movement through unique and responsive mark-making.
Materials: Black oil paint, rags and paper towels, mineral spirits, brushes on 2 stretched, gessoed, and
poly-acrylic(ed) 22"x30" Stonehenge
Master Copy Abstraction
Source painting: Bacchanal by Titian, Oil on canvas, 5'9" x6'4" 1518
Reference artists: Clintel Steed, Cecily Brown, Willem de Kooning
Titian's Bacchanal pictures a wild, drunken celebration. The figures within the painting are robust, muscular, and full of movement. The landscape they inhabit is lush, warm, and fertile.
Attempt to communicate these attributes in your abstract interpretation of this master work.
Planar Analysis, Warm and Cool Grays
Objectives:
- Translate the human form into a series of simplified, proportionate, and geometric shapes.
- Analyze and mix observed tone and color.
- Reconstruct observed tonal and chromatic relationships 2-dimensionally, representing the figure convincingly within a space in works executed over multiple sessions.
Materials: Viewfinder, sketchbook, graphite pencils, erasers, stretched, gessoed 18"x24" Stonehenge, white, burnt umber, and
ultramarine blue oil paints, mineral spirits, alkyd medium, flat brushes, palette knives
Tones, Boxed Forms
Objectives:
- Translate the human form into a series of simplified, proportionate, and geometric shapes.
- Analyze and mix observed tone and color.
- Reconstruct observed tonal and chromatic relationships 2-dimensionally, representing the figure convincingly within a space in works executed over multiple sessions.
Materials: Viewfinder, sketchbook, graphite pencils, erasers, stretched, gessoed 20"x16" Stonehenge, black and
white oil paints, mineral spirits, galkyd medium, palette knives, flat brushes
Limited Palette, Cut Paper Collage with Direct Painting, Planar Analysis
Objectives:
- Translate the human form into a series of simplified, proportionate, and geometric shapes.
- Analvze and mix observed tone and color.
- Reconstruct observed tonal and chromatic relationships 2-dimensionally, representing the figure convincingly
- within a space in works executed over multiple sessions.
Materials: viewfinder, sketchbook, graphite pencils, erasers, x-acto knives, scissors, flat brushes, palette knives,
acrylic paint, matte medium, painter's tape, stretched 24"x28" Stonehenge
Full Palette, Retinal Color Study
Objectives:
- Translate the human form into a series of simplified, proportionate, and qeometric shapes.
- Analyze and mix observed tone and color.
- Reconstruct observed tonal and chromatic relationships 2-dimensionally, representing the figure convincingly within a space in works executed over multiple sessions.
Materials: oil paints, mineral spirits, galkyd medium, palette knives, brushes, 26"x20" stretched canvas or cradled
panel
Larger-Than-LifeSelf-Portrait
Reference artists: Jenny Saville, Marlene Dumas, Sedrick Huckaby
Each of the artists above explores the complexities of identity, presence, and the physicality of
the human form while painting the head. Understand that subject matter is only one element
of a painting. How a painting is made, its scale, what materials are used, and how the paint is
applied generate as much meaning as who or what is being depicted
