Review and preview – art school update

Woooosh! Summer 2016 has come and gone. I am back in PA in starting my first week of my third year in art school. Here’s a quick review of what I worked on this summer and a sneak peak of the semester ahead as an aspiring artist and figure painter at Studio Incamminati.

Summer Goals

One of my goals for the summer was to work on a cast drawing. So, I would wake up bright and early (ya – 5:30 a.m. – ish) and spend 45 minutes drawing a cast of Michelangelo’s David’s ear under a single light source. The single light source is important because I struggle with seeing shapes in the light.

I am completely thrilled that I got my booty a$$ up at 5:30 a.m. in the morning to work on this drawing. Ya baby! Am I thrilled with my drawing (see it in the paragraph below). Meh! Not so much. Why? Well, I wanted this drawing to pop off the paper like the simple egg drawing I did earlier this summer here. Why didn’t this drawing pop off the paper? The short 45 minute drawing stints times the number of weeks in my summer break didn’t provide the time required to make this happen…yet.

Believe it or not, it takes hours to layer on graphite effectively and appropriately. If you look at the image in this paragraph, you can see I logged the date and the number of minutes I drew. Given that I spent an entire semester (18 weeks x 3 hours) doing a cast drawing last year, I came nowhere near the amount of time I spent on the cast drawing while at school.

Oh, also, I did two of these cast drawings this summer? Ya – I emailed one of my mighty instructors while doing the first cast drawing and learned that I needed a darker background. Why? So the light value on the wall would not reflect into the light areas of the cast. So I put some neutral grey canvas paper on the wall and placed the cast on top of that and started over again in mid-summer. Did this exercise help me? Well, to the extent that I am able to see shapes and perspective more accurately – YES! Can I learn more – heck YES!

The other assignments for the summer were charcoal wipe out drawings, self-portraits and paint what I love.  Yes, I did each of these assignments and here’s what I learned: 1) pay attention to how I hold and handle the charcoal and 2) keep working on portraits and self-portraits. I look forward to a deep dive into portrait painting in my third year which will inform my skills here, significantly.

Fun Painting

The fun paintings were all organic shapes and mostly – food! Figs, apples and more. Holy smokes I had fun painting these things. Some of my art school buddies troll thrift stores and their grandma’s attic for still life objects. Me? I stumbled (literally) across a humungous fig tree in our wonderful Raleigh neighborhood just bursting with figs. Voila – I was ready to set up and paint a few delicious paintings. I posted my favorite painting at the beginning of this blog post; it was super fun to paint and – er – consume, too!

Fall Classes

Here are the plans and adventures for this semester: on Mondays, I am taking portrait painting with Kerry Dunn and Natalie Italiano. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ll be painting the figure with instructors Lea Colie Wight and Jafang Lu. Wednesdays are a repeat (by design) of all things super structural in the head and figure with NYC-based, Dan Thompson.

Fridays for third level students are mentorship days. What does that mean? There are three options and we participate in all of them: option one is we work alongside an instructor in their studio for 7 weeks, option two is to copy a master painting by school co-founder Nelson Shanks with oversight by instructor Robin Frey and option three is to copy a painting at the Philadelphia Art Museum. I am excited to be mentoring alongside Shira Friedman this fall. Holy smokes, this is going to be an action-packed and demanding semester. Feel free to send along helpful and inspiring vibes along the way.

That’s the latest from Philadelphia. What’s happening in your world? I’d love to hear in the comments below!