Painting Courses
GRAD 1515-101 / PAINT 1515-101
EXPLORING LOOKING THROUGH OBSERVATIONAL PAINTING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This graduate level painting course is an intensive exploration into painting from observation. Through close attention to their immediate environments, students will hone skills of observational oil painting, and expand their knowledge of color mixing, materials, and techniques. Students will practice close looking and translating the world they witness through paint and color, hopefully seeing beyond what meets the eye. The beginning of the course will focus on translating observed color and space in oil paint as it relates to light, value, contrast, temperature, and saturation. We will discuss surface preparation, and the material, expressive, and embodied qualities of oil paint, focusing not only on what we paint–but how we paint it. Assignments will include painting on site in the landscape, painting deep space, and choosing subjects related to students’ current practices and interests. Ultimately, this class will focus on the power and impact of our own attention. In other words, students will challenge their conceptual understanding of the subjects they paint, and the spaces they witness from the start to finish of a painting. We will look to contemporary and art historical examples of how close observation can enrich and inform a painting practice. The hope for this course is to generate close looking and observation to feed back into your ongoing practices, and to take a deep dive into painting color and materials.
Estimated Materials Cost: $350.00
Open to Graduate Students only.
Elective
IDISC 230G-01 / PAINT 230G-01
ADVANCED GRADUATE STUDIO: INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES OF RELATION
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This Graduate Studio course attends to three foundational texts Edward Glissant: Poetics of Relation, Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space, and Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, and is an exploratory course in which graduate students from various Fine Arts departments across RISD pursue and discuss their existing practices in a setting that reflects, as closely as possible, the interdisciplinary and intersectional conversations taking place around advanced art practices today. The course is broken into three, four-week modules situated along these texts as inter- / trans- / multi-disciplinary forms of research and production. This Studio-based course focuses holistically on a balance of seminar components (readings, screenings, and discussions) interwoven with studio visits, and critique, in order to grow graduate students' understanding of how their work functions across a variety of disciplines. The course is intended to allow students to challenge how their work will make meaning in art worlds in which a variety of intersectional discourses and disciplinary histories inform, resist and reshape one another, as well as to provide an opportunity for all students whose work bridges multi disciplines (including performance and post-studio approaches) to learn from one another and from faculty capable of addressing these sorts of practices.
Offered as PAINT-230G and IDISC-230G.
Please contact the instructor for permission to register. Preference will be given to Graduate Painting, Sculpture or Textiles Students.
Elective
IDISC 230G-01 / PAINT 230G-01
ADVANCED GRADUATE STUDIO: INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES OF RELATION
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This Graduate Studio course attends to three foundational texts Edward Glissant: Poetics of Relation, Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space, and Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, and is an exploratory course in which graduate students from various Fine Arts departments across RISD pursue and discuss their existing practices in a setting that reflects, as closely as possible, the interdisciplinary and intersectional conversations taking place around advanced art practices today. The course is broken into three, four-week modules situated along these texts as inter- / trans- / multi-disciplinary forms of research and production. This Studio-based course focuses holistically on a balance of seminar components (readings, screenings, and discussions) interwoven with studio visits, and critique, in order to grow graduate students' understanding of how their work functions across a variety of disciplines. The course is intended to allow students to challenge how their work will make meaning in art worlds in which a variety of intersectional discourses and disciplinary histories inform, resist and reshape one another, as well as to provide an opportunity for all students whose work bridges multi disciplines (including performance and post-studio approaches) to learn from one another and from faculty capable of addressing these sorts of practices.
Offered as PAINT-230G and IDISC-230G.
Open to Graduate Students only.
Elective
PAINT 1551-101
PAINTING IN 3D
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This hands-on studio course will explore the ways in which artists have taken painting into the realm of 3D. Each class will have lessons about using different kinds of paint additives, tools like trowels and spatulas, and surface materials like wood, fabric, and rope. We will also consider the ways that artists have sculpted images throughout history, looking first at ancient bas reliefs and working our way towards the Gutai group in Japan, the hanging canvases of Sam Gilliam, and the fiber infused works of Rachel Eulena Williams. The class will include essays on Tishan Hsu, Lee Bontecou, and the Dansaekhwa movement in Korea, as well as excerpts from William C. Seitz’s The Art of Assemblage, among others. This class is open to undergraduate and graduate students from all departments, and students will be encouraged to incorporate ideas and techniques from their own practices.
Estimated Cost of Materials: $200.00
Elective
PAINT 1560-101
DRAWING, DEFINITION, DISCOVERY
SECTION DESCRIPTION
As the French playwright, writer, and literary critic, Hélène Cixous, expresses, “it’s not a question of drawing the contours, but what escapes the contour, the secret movement, the breaking, the torment, the unexpected”. We too will aspire to chase the magic that occurs inside, outside, and between the lines. This course will challenge students to discover different approaches to drawing through an exploration of materials, surfaces, tools, and structures. The infinite potential of drawing to standalone, be a part of, underline, emphasize, negate, and integrate within an artist’s practice is one of the reasons why it continues to be fundamental to contemporary artists working today. From the mythological world of Chitra Ganesh to the theatricality of William Kentridge’s animations, to Tala Madani’s sketchbook filled with humor, and to longing for home in Do Ho Suh’s manipulation of thread, students will have the opportunity to widen their knowledge of global methods of thinking, making, processing, and reflecting, all through the expanded definition of ‘drawing’. Students will be encouraged to seek ways and understand how drawing exists in their practices through guided prompts, group and individual critiques, as well a trip to the RISD Museum’s Prints, Drawings and Photographs collection.
Elective
PAINT 1565-101
SELF-PORTRAIT PAINTING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
What is it that draws artists to the mirror over and over again? How do we engage with self-portraiture in the age of the selfie? What are the stakes in a self-portrait painting? This course will explore self-portrait painting as a mode of inquiry, expression, and intervention. While the emphasis of this course is on the painted self-portrait, students will be encouraged to explore their own material interests and alternative modes of investigation. Weekly readings will offer the opportunity to engage critically with the themes emerging in the studio work. Slide lectures and visits to the RISD Museum will prompt discussion on how artists past and present have engaged with self-portraiture and its many transgressive possibilities.
Elective
PAINT 1566-01
DRAWING AS WEAVING, WEAVING AS DRAWING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
In the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary art, this course provides an exciting platform for students to explore the intersection between visual culture,material culture, commodity, ethnicity, and the global world in the medium of drawing. This course seeks to push boundaries, break free from conventions, and delve into the uncharted territories of advanced drawing techniques while critically engaging with diverse cultural context, materials, and artistic traditions in Southeast Asia (specifically The Philippines). Exploring various drawing materials, techniques, and aesthetics, this course will embark on a captivating weaving tradition, weaving concepts, and patterns of an archipelagic Asian region by examining visual traditions, narratives, and techniques that shape its vibrant regions, peoples, and objects. Through a series of dynamic projects, hands-on practice, cultural immersion, individualized guidance, and critical analysis, students will transform weavings into drawings and vice versa to explore the outer edges of their artistic expressions to enhance their drawing skills. The course also invites students to reimagine what drawing is in an expanded field. We will be sharing personal, familial, and cultural stories and experiences that influenced who we are and what we are making - then turning it into an art form that visualizes our struggles, intimacy, dreams, connections, and survival.
We will ask questions such as:
- What kind of drawing approaches can we use to break free from institutional expectations?
- How can we bridge the gap between exploration and explanation?
- How can we transform our personal and cultural self into objects and art forms?
- What is survival?
- How can we better understand labor, exploitation, colonialism, ethnicity, and production in the perspective of the ‘other’?
Elective
PAINT 2451-101
PAINTING KAIJU
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Since the beginning of recorded time, the impulse towards the monumental has existed to inspire awe and terror. This course aims to consider past, current, and future problems and possibilities in upscaling visual art practices. The class will be hands on with a focus on (but not limited to) painting. We will consider methodologies, materials, presentation and practicalities. Artists and periods considered: Leonardo DaVinci, Michelangelo, Eugene Delacroix, Caspar David Friedrich, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, WPA murals, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Gutai, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Los Angeles Muralists, Judith Baca, Paul McCarthy, Katherina Grosse, Richard Wright, El Anatsui, Adam Pendleton and Lauren Halsey. Readings: Kant, Burke, Farmer, Fried, Haraway, Lovecraft. Videos: Bruce Conner’s The White Rose (Jay DeFeo), Jackson Pollock in the Studio, Eames Studio, Powers of Ten, Godzilla.
Elective
PAINT 2452-101
RADICAL IMAGINATION IN SOUTH ASIAN MINIATURE PAINTING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course is designed to teach students about South Asian Miniature history and its techniques while being framed within the concept of radical imagination. The first half of this course will focus on South Asian history, how miniature was first conceived within South Asia, inspirations, motifs, and beliefs while connecting it to contemporary issues, specifically appropriation, archiving, queerness, and identity. In contrast, the second half of this course will use this information to connect it to the material, and the technical importance of those histories. While this course is based around Miniature specifically, students will be encouraged to use the techniques they have learned to create original works for their final project. This course covers basic techniques such as tonal exercises, rendering through watercolor, and tea washes. An expansive frame of references will be presented through slide talks, readings, trips to the museum to look at Risd’s collection of miniature paintings, and looking at other artists who have taken inspiration from miniature paintings and manuscripts within contemporary art and used them to create abstract spaces. This research-based studio connects students with post-colonial ways of knowing and making. Students will engage in art and fictional works informed by different perspectives within the miniature canon. The course will present these critiques through cosmic, cultural, and personal themes. Students will be encouraged to experiment with how they might employ techniques such as compilation and remix to express their own ideas. Through a series of activities, presentations, discussions, and assignments, students will become familiar with postcolonial approaches to space-time, mapping, and relation.
Elective
PAINT 2453-101
THE BODY: INSIDE AND OUT
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Students will develop a conceptual, perceptual, and emotional understanding of the
figure in this course. By first forming a volumetric understanding of the underlying structure of
the body, students will learn to conceptualize human anatomy and think about the way a body
sits in space. Over the course of the class, students will transition from working directly from a
live model to engaging with more personally driven work. While the beginning structure of the
class prioritizes drawing media, material exploration will be supported and encouraged
throughout the course. Through project prompts and conversation, students will explore the
empathetic relationship between an artist and their model, the sociopolitical or psychological
context produced by a figure’s relationship to a space, as well as the bodily sensations that can
influence an artist’s work. Discussion of these themes will be informed by short readings from TJ
Clark, Audre Lorde, and Sara Ahmed; slideshows of pertinent artists ranging from Jacopo
Pontormo and the Fayum portraits to Maria Lassnig and Jonathan Lyndon Chase; and a trip to
RISD’s museum. Students will examine their relationship to the body and how it materializes
within their art practice.
Elective
PAINT 2540-101
PROCESS-BASED PAINTING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course will explore frameworks for approaching painting in a way that centers process, intuition, color and material exploration, as an alternative to direct observation. We’ll investigate histories of improvisational painting and open-ended methods of generating work.The course will emphasize both collaborative and independent modes of making. Group activities will include daily painting prompts, demos, games, screenings, readings, visits to museums, and discussion. Independent studio work will include 10 wintersession long paintings that will engage with processes of reduction, addition, and obstruction.
Elective
PAINT 2562-01
FLIRTING WITH RESEARCH, SWIMMING IN ARCHIVES
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This studio course mines the idea of research in contemporary art. It offers the students the space and support needed to cultivate their own methodology of research—one that is dedicated to their unique art practice. There is a porous and slippery space where visual arts and critical theory commingle. It is a space full of playful potential. Here, we move beyond the exhausted texts commonly thrown at art students. Instead, we imagine and find inspiration from intimate friendships among visual artists and thinkers—and all that they make possible for each other. In between the lines, in the corner of archives, in the silence of kind gossip; we honor and take inspiration from dinner parties, cafes, bars, and abandoned public libraries, where our elders found each other. Fred Moten sits with Julie Mehretu; Saidiya Hartman with Okwui Okpokwasili; Trinh T Minh-ha with Theresa Hakyung Cha; José Esteban Muñoz with Ana Mendieta: we keep imagining, smudging the lines between art and theory, reality and fiction, history and desire, now and the past. It all becomes blurry. Call it research, call it art: we have work to do.
Flirting is a studio class, a space dedicated to visual art, studio practice, visits, group crits, discussions, and time spent among artist students. Each student will work on their own body of work and be offered close guidance to explore research. We will brainstorm and find artists, texts, archives, histories, oral stories, and rituals in support of each student’s research and practice. Instead of papers, presentations, and reports, we will return to each student’s work. Exploring formats such as studio visits and group crit, we gather as a class to talk, dig deeper, and explore the artist’s terms, context, political urgency, archives, and history narrative. There will be periodic texts and artists introduced to help guide our path and ground our gathering: Saidiya Hartman, José Esteban Muñoz, Mariam Ghani, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, William Kentridge, Hans Haacke, Julie Mehretu, Wael Shawky, Cecilia Vicuña, to name a few.
Open to Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.
Elective
PAINT 3407-101
PAINTING FROM OBSERVATION MARATHON
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Painting from Observation will be a team taught Schedule A and B marathon for 6 credits. Drawing, collage, printmaking and painting will introduce students to contemporary painting as practised by the RISD Painting Department. This course is a comprehensive introduction to painting. It is designed to develop confidence and experience with paint and painting. We will examine historical and contemporary trends and paint from life models and photo sources. Fundamental techniques for basic ground preparation, oil painting mediums and direct as well as in direct processes will be taught. Representational painting will be the primary focus but experiences in abstract painting will also be encouraged. We will learn abstract principles that organize composition, depict spatial illusion and describe form while developing a shared language for critiques. No prior painting experience is required.
Elective
PAINT 3505-01
EXPERIMENTS IN MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES WORKSHOP
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a hands-on course, designed for advanced painting students who are fascinated by color, surface, transformation and alchemy, DIY processes, craftmanship, invention, and the stuff of paint. It is for those who are eager to dive deep into all sorts of materials, methods and techniques. The objective of the class is to arm students with the tools and resources to figure out how to make what they imagine and to expand their practice through material exploration and information sharing. With an emphasis on experimentation, play, research and development; advanced students explore, problem solve and implement specific grounds, paints, supports, mediums and tools into their own practices. The level of specialization and expertise students may eventually desire for their work could require seeking the advice of paint manufacturers, conservators, fabricators, other artists or even experts in other fields. How to identify and acquire knowledge outside of one's comfort zone, approaching and finding a common terminology with peers and specialists is also a part of this course. Relevant art historical and contemporary methodologies, techniques and materials will be presented. Environmental Health and Safety guidelines that apply to painting practice and painting studio safety will be an integral part of this course.
Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00
Open to Junior, Senior or Graduate Painting Students.
Elective
PAINT 4222-101
PRIMARY SOURCES ILLUMINATING THE OCEAN DEEP AT THE NEW BEDFORD WHALING MUSEUM
SECTION DESCRIPTION
Museums are stewards of history; the present moment is radically testing the role museums play as storytellers while also challenging how and for whom historical narratives are told. The colonial history of this region was profoundly shaped by an industry built on the systematic hunting and harvesting of whales, driving entire species to the brink of extinction. Located just 35 miles east of Providence, the New Bedford Whaling Museum tells this story and offers a challenging look into the great sacrifices made in order for American industry and culture to thrive. Through several visits to the New Bedford Whaling Museum this course asks students to reflect upon and interpret a wide range of interrelated subjects, objects, and their shared histories and relationships to both humans, whales, and the environment. From folk art to nautical culture, from colonial economies to subsistence hunting, and from natural history to curatorial practice, through research, students illuminate the stories the ocean has to tell us about ourselves so that our recognition of the past may help guide us towards a more sustainable future. With enhanced access to museum archives students address these topics with research-based projects employing a range of fine art media with specific attention to contextualizing within different modes of museum display. The New Bedford Whaling museum boasts a rich collection of unique and unusual artifacts, issuing a cautionary tale, and asking visitors to contemplate the tenuous line between the pursuit of profit and the destruction of that which is most sacred.
Elective
PAINT 424G-01
MEANING IN THE MEDIUM OF PAINTING
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This first-year graduate seminar approaches painting as a technical skill, a historical practice and an intellectual project. Weekly sessions begin with group discussions of key readings about recent painting. Readings are organized in three sections. The first looks backward, to the problem of medium that preoccupied modernist painting and, residually, contemporary practices until the 1980s. The second section looks at the academy, the institution and the art market, and their effect on how painting is produced, disseminated, discussed and received. The third, the most speculative, looks laterally at a range of contemporary practices and their cultural frameworks from the 1990s to the present. Frequent studio visits will occur and drive some of the reading and discussion.
Please contact the instructor for permission to register. Preference is given to Graduate Painting Students.
Elective
PAINT 4415-01
COLOR WORKSHOP
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This studio-based course will provide the foundation necessary to understand basic color theory and practice in painting, art and design. A historical and cultural perspective will be introduced to inform ongoing color studies executed in the studio. Students will acquire the vocabulary to articulate color phenomena and the means to exploit the expressive potential of color in their work. Color studies will be principally created with gouache, and a variety of other materials and means will also be explored. lectures, demonstrations, and museum visits will supplement studio work. (An in class presentation is required).
Elective
PAINT 4415-01
COLOR WORKSHOP
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This studio-based course will provide the foundation necessary to understand basic color theory and practice in painting, art and design. A historical and cultural perspective will be introduced to inform ongoing color studies executed in the studio. Students will acquire the vocabulary to articulate color phenomena and the means to exploit the expressive potential of color in their work. Color studies will be principally created with gouache, and a variety of other materials and means will also be explored. lectures, demonstrations, and museum visits will supplement studio work. (An in class presentation is required).
Open to Junior, Senior or Graduate Painting Students.
Elective
PAINT 4415-101
COLOR WORKSHOP
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This studio-based course will provide the foundation necessary to understand basic color theory and practice in painting, art and design. A historical and cultural perspective will be introduced to inform ongoing color studies executed in the studio. Students will acquire the vocabulary to articulate color phenomena and the means to exploit the expressive potential of color in their work. Color studies will be principally created with gouache, and a variety of other materials and means will also be explored. lectures, demonstrations, and museum visits will supplement studio work. (An in class presentation is required).
Elective
PAINT 4490-01
FROM PAINTING TO CINEMA AND BACK AGAIN
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The work intensive studio course will involved students in an intense visual, aesthetic and theoretical discussion around the historical relationship of Cinema to Painting and Arts Culture in general and move on to the analyze the current embodiment of Cinema's more conflated and confounded, co-dependant relationship to the Art's of today, tapping into the cross-pollination resulting of imagery, politics and theory's as they apply. Each class meeting will involve studio work and discussion and culminate with a film screening. The film screenings will move forward from Cinema's very beginnings to a few of today's best Indie films. The concentration of the course will be assigned painting projects that will be direct responses to the films being screened and related critiques of these projects as they pertain to the films and the applicable supplemental literature, allowing the discussion around Cinema, cinematic and art critical theory and the Art culture to be transferred to the students individual works thus allowing for the work to be seen in a larger context.
Elective