Topics 2D: Painting and Drawing: Up Close and Personal
PUFA 3220 (CRN: 1957)
Thursdays 9:00am-2:40pm
Unexpected things often happen when you keep looking at objects for a long time – all the more so, now that such prolonged looking is increasingly rare. ‘Seeing,’ as Paul Valéry once wrote, ‘is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” This studio class explores the problems and wonders involved in transcribing this long, hard looking onto a two-dimensional plane. These intense meditations on a portion of the phenomenal world – found and/or constructed objects, set-ups or sites – will become trajectories for individual projects in painting or drawing. Our conversations will consider the value of a practice based on a sustained and repeated visual encounter with a subject from “life.” To paint the same vessels over and over, as did Giorgio Morandi, or every infinite detail of a tumbleweed, as does Ellen Atlfest, is simply (or not simply) to make paintings about painting. It is not a grand subject-matter, rather the ardent attention to life that glorifies these works.
Faculty Bio:
Shoshana Dentz is a New-York based artist who works in painting and drawing. Her work has been shown most recently at September Gallery, Hudson and Ortega Y Gasset, Brooklyn. National and international exhibitions include those at MoMA PS1, The Drawing Center, Rose Art Museum, Rubin Museum of Art, Pera Museum Istanbul, Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Graduate Center, Kohler Arts Center and White Columns. She has been awarded grants and residencies from Pollack-Krasner Foundation, NYFA, the Lower Eastside Printshop, FID Drawing Prize, Art Omi and Residenza Conventino, Anghiari, Italy.
