Painting

Painting offers the opportunity to develop avenues of original and imaginative thinking through the experience of creative forming. Painting is presented as an evolving process which expresses the contemporary experience. The painting concentration address the basic formal, technical, and thematic issues of painting, and seeks to stimulate a responsive awareness of the art of the present as well as of the legacy of art history.

First: Art in its origins was magic, a magic aid towards mastering a real but unexplored world…a magic residue in art cannot be entirely eliminated, for without that minute residue of its original nature, art ceases to be art.

…art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognize and change the world. But it is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent in it.

– William James

Second: Every question posed by man is by definition a creative forming. In this sense art can be perceived as all-embracing, drawing on the potential of each individual in his capacity as a primarily creative being, at the same time as relating to society as a whole.

– Joseph Beuys

Third: What an age is like is never what it thinks it is, which is why the best art of any period, the art which the future realizes to be the product of its time, is usually rather disliked when it happens.

– W.H. Auden

Objectives

To develop a familiarity with basic techniques of painting through practice
To develop aesthetic judgment through the analysis of visual form.
To experience the creative process through the making of paintings.
To better understand the relationship between art and life.