Drawing Resources:
Anne Harris http://www.anneharrispainting.com
Barbara Takenaga http://www.barbaratakenaga.com
Jay DeFeo http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/JayDeFeo
Susan Scwhalb http://www.susanschwalb.com
Leon Ferrari https://www.moma.org/artists/1859?locale=en
Gego. https://www.moma.org/artists/2107#works
Simonette Quamina https://www.simonettequamina.com
Francis Davison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s47YpqT92wA
Wangechi Mutu http://wangechimutu.com
finally above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed; I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that’s why I made works of art….Felix Gonzales Torres 1957-1996
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I would work at it at night and get the light right, and it was like magic. I’d just put one of these little ceramic pieces here or there, and you couldn’t see the wire that attached it. All you’d see were these little white things floating. And. then I’d move the light, and the “drawing” of the wire would hit the wall, and I’d think, that’s better than the sculpture! That’s a great drawing! Lee Bontecu
Economy and structure and intuition.
Overlapping forms…The intense sensitivity of the moon-at each stage retaining its perfection, size 36.
Break
Rest
Break the cycle of seeing.
Magic and awareness arrives.
Diaries of Nasreen Mohamedi 1937-1990
At the most basic level—beyond attempting to link the “formal” language of abstraction with the folk art of jianzhi (papercut)—I also tinker with subtle symbolic implications and metaphors that connect the past and the present, the east and the west, philosophy and religion. In doing so, my work traverses through the medium of drawings, I installations and sculptures. Fred Liang
About sixty years ago, most educated people could draw in a quite skillful way. Which meant they could tell other people about certain experiences in a certain way. Their visual delights could be expressed….Today people don’t draw very much. They use the camera. My point is, they’re not truly, perhaps, expressing what it was they were looking at -what it was about it that delighted them-and how that delight forced them to make something of it, to share the experience, to make it vivid to somebody else. David Hockney
you are feeling your way into the thing. Emily Carr 1871-1945
The process of drawing is, before all else, the process of putting the visual intelligence into action, the very mechanics of visual thought. Unlike painting and sculpture, it is the process by which the artist makes clear to himself, and not to the spectator, what he is doing. It is a soliloquy before it becomes communication. Michael Ayrton 1921-1975
Final Summative Report
Review past graduates summative reports below in week two of the schedule. Use these as a guide for ideas in presentation, from a report format to a listing format to a booklet format. The assignments differ in class to class, semester to semester though so these are just prompts in presentation.
A. Open with a title page
B. Include an artist resume’ or cv
C. Write an artist or designer or educator statement about your work. (This is a few paragraphs about your goals, ideas, execution, influences, future visions, etc.) If you want to include a bio that can follow the cv or resume. Please do not reference semester or thesis..but rather work and research..project or investigation…so the report stands alone. Reflect on the qualities and categories of growth in your work.
D.
Include images of all of your work for this seminar in clear format with labels of size (height by width), materials, and title if given.
Independent Work
New Ground
Equal Tone
Silver Point (if done..optional)
Series of 10
Long Drawing
E. Include your interview of your peer or another artist using drawing with both the questions and the answers and an image of the interviewee and their work or paired works with the interview questions.
Put into one PDF with Last Name_Drawing
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Third Week:
Porous-act-of-drawing-by-malone
seriality-and-synchronicity-by-elena-nechita1
For contemporary series works, watch Ellen Gallagher Art 21 videohttps://art21.org/artist/ellen-gallagher/
Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1965, and lives and works in New York and Rotterdam, Holland. She attended Oberlin College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Repetition and revision are central to Gallagher’s treatment of advertisements that she appropriates from popular magazines like Ebony, Our World, and Sepia and uses in works like eXelento (2004) and DeLuxe(2004–05). Initially, Gallagher was drawn to the wig advertisements because of their grid-like structure. Later, she realized that it was the accompanying language that attracted her, and she began to bring these “narratives” into her paintings—making them function through the characters of the advertisements, as a kind of chart of lost worlds.
Individual Meetings
Enjoyable Read: Irish Museum What is Drawing? https://www.imma.ie/en/downloads/whatisdrawing2013.pdf
Metalpoint Drawing.
Color Aid and Pilke paper and silver points supplied.
Chazan Gallery in person exhibition visit.
The Boston Drawing Project https://thebostondrawingproject.net
RISD Museum Collection Friese Museum Drawings Choices
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Fifth Week:
Series Works: any work up to the total 10 outer edge all the same size in each.
Drawing on a new ground
Drawing of limited tonal range
Peer Interview Assignment
Pose six substantive open-ended questions and arrange an interview time with your interviewee. You may interview in video, in email, in person. Focus the interview on work for this class and intersecting works. Content, procedures, goals, methods, failures, reflections may be areas one could probe in questions to your peer. The interviewee will answer in writing, video, email, or in-person.
Sample interviews:
The Archives of American Art has written transcripts of designers and artists
such as Anni Albers interview below.
https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-anni-albers-12134#transcript
Some of the websites that used to have extensive written interviews are now just using video interview format; one can infer the questions the artist/designer has been asked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAqag6mU8z4
https://www.thisdesignlife.net/interviews-with-designers/
https://drawingcenter.org/posts/rirkrit-tiravanija-conversation
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Sixth Week: Midterm Zoom Group Meeting
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Assignment: Enjoyable Read: Midterm: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/apr/21/make-your-mark-enduring-appeal-of-drawing-draw-art-fair-london-saatchi-laura-cumming A general overview of drawing’s power.
Necessary Read
The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramon y Cajal
Historical medical drawings by a neuro-researcher over time.
The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal
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Seventh Week: Peer Interview Sharing
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Eighth Week: Open/Work/Individual Meetings
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NinthWeek: Open/Work/Individual Meetings
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Tenth Week: Individual Meetings
Charts, and toned grounds, books and reading sources precede a review any new work by the group.
Color Ideas and Reflections: Charts, Resources, Colored Grounds Synthesis, and Integration.
Enjoyable Reads: Wash and Gouache by Marjorie Cohn https://risdcollegiateteaching.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/wash-and-gouache-marjorie-cohn.pdf
Color Resources:
Colour: The Professional’s Guide Karen Triedman 2015 full range of ideas around color use including new media. RISD faculty’s book.
Materials of Artists and Their Use in Painting. Max Doerner. 1935. With a very good section on painters’ color-methods. This manual along with Ralph Mayer’s Materials and Techniques and Bernard Chaet’s An Artist’s Notebook 1979 and The Art of Drawing are cornerstones to working methods for drawing.
Chromophobia. David Batchelor 2000 and Luminosity and The Grey 2014 Contemporary philosophical and contextual ideas about color.
Color a Natural History of Palette. Victoria Finlay 2003 Fascinating traveling look at color through history and culture.
Interaction of Color.Josef Albers 1963 the basic primer for painters and designers to more powerfully use color.
Color: A Workshop Approach. David Hornung 2004 work-a-day manual for artists and designers to apply color principles.
The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and Their Applications to the Arts. Gobelin Tapestry’s Chemist Theory. M. E. Chevreul 1860 reflections on color for industry and artists as an early applied system of color.
Modern chromatics; students’ text-book of color,: With applications to art and industry Ogden N Rood and Faber Birren 1879very in-depth survey of science and methods of use for color in the late 19th century which gave a foundation for modernist color.
Blue: The History of a Color Michael Pastoureau 2004 Red: The History of a Color 2016 and more volumes on specific colors.
Wash and Gouache: A Study of the Development of WatercolorMarjorie B Cohn, Rachel Rosenfield. a survey of British watercolor techniques and applications. The RISD Museum has 600 British watercolors that exhibit a full spectrum of color usage from tonality, to luminosity, to color interaction. Looking at these and the range of color Japanese woodcuts would fortify one’s color thinking.
A Dictionary of Color Combinations by Sanzo Wada (1883-1967) an artist, teacher, costume and kimono designer in avant-garde Japanese art and cinema. A richly visual and beautiful treatise on color.
Wash and Gouache Marjorie Cohn
RISD’s Color Lab opposite the RISD Store…The Lab will grow to house research collections and provide resources—physical and electronic—that allow classes to experience first-hand demonstrations and experiments clarifying the importance of color in human experience and world culture. In our first year, we will host events, lectures, demonstrations and classes, all centered on the rich and vital subject of color.
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Eleventh Week:
Twelth Week: Final Group Sharing
Thirteenth Week: Final Group Sharing
Tuesday December 14th : Final PDF of Drawings, Final Drawing Statement Title Last Name_Drawings_2020. Prepare a summative statement of the semester work with visual representations. Reflect on the qualities and categories of growth in your work.
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Agnes Denes Works and Drawings By Holland Carter
CRITIC’S PICK
At 88, Agnes Denes Finally Gets the Retrospective She Deserves
She set out to change humanity. Now a superbly installed survey at the Shed charts this visionary artist’s 50-year journey.
By Holland CotterNov. 7, 2019
We’ll be lucky this art season if we get another exhibition as tautly beautiful as “Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates” at the Shed. And we’ll be right to ponder why this artist, who was born in Budapest 88 years ago and has lived in New York City for more than 60 years, is only now having a retrospective here.
Must neglect be the price paid by brilliant art that lies outside ready marketing categories, that baffles conventional critical thinking, that manages to be, paradoxically, mortality-haunted and hopeful? Too often the answer is “yes,” particularly if the art is by a woman.
I learned of Ms. Denes late, in 1982, by which time she already had a significant career. I was living in Lower Manhattan, two blocks from the Hudson River and an empty grass-stubbled urban prairie that had been formed by landfill excavated from the World Trade Center building site. (Battery Park City sits there now.)
One spring day I noticed a truck dumping fresh earth at the site, then people digging long furrows and sowing seeds. In early summer green shoots came up, grew tall, turned tawny yellow. By mid-August, two-acres worth of waist-high wheat was ripe for cutting.
Kansas had landed in Manhattan! If you stood in the middle of the field — and anyone could — you had views of the twin towers rising nearby and the Statue of Liberty off to the south. The scent there that hot summer was pure country (as were the bugs). Then one day a thresher showed up and harvested the crop. I wasn’t around for that, but when I dropped by the landfill later I remember feeling shocked and dismayed to find the field bare, the wheat gone.
If you stood in the middle of the wheatfield, Holland Cotter writes, you had views of the twin towers rising nearby and the Statue of Liberty off to the south.
Once harvested, the wheat traveled to 28 cities across the globe in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger.”
The planting was a work of environmental art conceived and produced by Ms. Denes, with the help of a small crew, on a commission from the Public Art Fund. The title she gave the project — “Wheatfield — A Confrontation” — nailed its political intent, though you understood it, without prompting, at the sight of two acres of breeze-swept natural bounty, accessible to all, sprouting beneath the silos of capitalist greed that were the twin towers. (The wheat ended up traveling to 28 cities across the globe in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger.”)
You can still sense the power of that image from documentary photographs and a 1982 video of the artist being interviewed by the NBC newscaster Jane Pauley, all on view on the Shed’s fourth floor, where the superbly installed survey of nearly 150 works, spanning Ms. Denes’s career, begins.
Her focus on ecology, on the fear of present decay and the hope for future survival is clear from the start in sequential shots of a 1968solo performance, “Rice/Tree/Burial,” done in upstate New York, in which she planted grains of rice, bound trees with chains and buried time-capsule copies of her own poems. Yet most of her work, early and late, is the form of meticulously executed diagrammatic drawings based on scientific and philosophical subjects: the workings of the brain, the complexities of language, the possibilities of post-Anthropocene habitation — in short, the fundamentals of what she is not afraid to refer to as “human existence.”
Ms. Denes during a re-enactment of “Rice/Tree/Burial” (1977-79) in Lewiston, N.Y. For the work, first realized in 1968, she planted grains of rice and buried copies of her poems.Credit…Agnes Denes and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
In “Morse Code Message” (1969-1975), religion and ethics are the artist’s main concerns. It translates biblical passages into a language of dashes and dots.Credit…Debbie and Glenn August; Stan Narten
Ms. Denes’s elaborate 1970 drawing “Liberated Sex Machine” reduces the grand opera of sexual coupling to a user-unfriendly instructional chart.Credit…Art Institute of Chicago; Art Resource
In certain word-intensive pieces, like “Manifesto” (1969), which appears large on a wall outside the show, a tendency to abstract loftiness is tempered by plain-style language, with results that read like concrete poetry. Other, more purely graphic drawings have the flawless crispness of digital prints. (Ms. Denes was a pioneer in applying computer technology to art and in the 1970s was already forecasting the fate of knowledge-as-truth in a coming age of information overload.)
Religion and ethics enter the picture in a work in low relief called “Morse Code Message” (1969-1975). Made from bits of white plastic attached to a dark plexiglass ground, it translates biblical passages in which God lays down the law for mankind into a language — supposedly universal — of dashes and dots.
And there’s humor. An avowed feminist and one of the founders, in 1972, of the all-women A.I.R. Gallery (then in SoHo, now in Dumbo, Brooklyn), Ms. Denes takes satirical jabs at the workings of gender in an elaborate 1970 drawing, “Liberated Sex Machine,” that reduces the grand opera of sexual coupling to a user-unfriendly instructional chart.
All of this probably qualifies in some sense as Conceptual Art, which would make Ms. Denes a rare participant in a mostly male category. Yet her work has a speculative breadth and, most important, an attention to visual presence that much classic Conceptual work does not. She has basically carved out an independent, label-free niche for herself and has been occupying and expanding it for over 50 years.
Visionary is one label that does apply, though the art world has never been sure what to do with it, whether to trust it. Over the years, as she has taken on increasingly elaborate ecological projects, her drawings, which she calls a form of “visual philosophy” — have grown more ambitious. They include distorted world maps, in which the geopolitical relations we’re familiar with are unfixed. There are designs for cities that are also space stations, vehicles for exploration but also for escape.
Many of the designs are based on the ancient, energy-channeling form of the pyramid, but the pyramid is now relieved of weight and monumental function. Ordinarily rigid and vertically directed, the pyramid, in Ms. Denes’s drawings, stretches and twists, swells like an egg, curls like a snail, flies like a bird. Everything in the world, as this artist sees it, is in flux, subject to growth and decay, a dynamic that is dramatically embodied in her public projects.
An installation view of the artist’s studies for her recent pyramid and teardrop works, which are on the second floor of the Shed.Credit…Elizabeth Bick for The New York Times
Only a few of the many she has proposed in drawings have been realized. “Wheatfield — A Confrontation” is by far the best known, and was, of course, meant to be ephemeral. Another, still-intact public work, “Tree Mountain — A Living Time Capsule — 11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years,” has a longer projected time span, though still a finite one.
Built in Ylojarvi, Finland, from 1992 to 1996, it consists of a handmade hill covered with trees arranged in a mathematically determined spiral pattern. Each tree has been planted by a volunteer who has been contractually granted ownership of it, valid for four centuries, and transferable generationally. The larger idea behind the arrangement is straightforward: Conservation is both an individual and collective responsibility, extending far into the future.
Photographs of “Tree Mountain” are in the show, as are plans for other projects that still exist only on paper or as models. One is for a system of artificial dunes to protect the storm-wracked Rockaways in Queens, N.Y. Another is for an air-cleansing virgin forest to be planted on landfill also in Queens. A third, and probably the least likely to be given the go-ahead any time soon, is for a Peace Park in Washington, D.C.
The qualities that distinguish such work from 1960s and ’70s Land Art, with which Ms. Denes has sometimes been associated, are the same qualities that mark her drawings: a combination of moral rigor and an uninvasive lightness of touch. And what separates her work from object-fixated, dollar-value art of the 21st century is an insistence on impermanence. (That the retrospective is happening in the cash-buttressed fortress of Hudson Yards is an irony surely not lost on her.)
Positioned almost in the center of the fourth-floor galleries is a 1969 installation called “Human Dust.” It has two main components. One is a poster-size wall text telling the story of an unnamed man’s life. “He was an artist,” it begins. “He was born fifty years ago, which means he lived app. 2/3 of his expected life span.” We get statistics: the number of his close relationships, the number of places he lived. We learn details of his appetite (“During his lifetime he consumed 4800 lbs. of bread, 140 gallons of wine”), and of his character (“He was unhappy and lonely more often than not”). The account, basically an obituary, concludes: “34 people remembered him or spoke of him after his death and his remains shown here represent 1/85 of his entire body.”
The remains are indeed on display: a clear glass bowl filled with fragmented bones.
As if in response to this somewhat unnerving memorial, the galleries on the second floor, where the show concludes, have a dusky chapel-like atmosphere. Many of the most extravagantly imagined late drawings are here, as is a model of the Queens forest, financed by the Shed, and two sculptures, also commissioned by the Shed for the show.
One, “Probability Pyramid — Study for Crystal Pyramid,” is a 17-foot-tall pyramid with inward curving walls. Made from thousands of 3-D printed white blocks and lighted from within, it has the presence of a traditional monument but looks like a giant lantern. It was conceived in 1976 to be even taller: 30 feet, a height that could, with the addition of more blocks, be reached in a future setting.
The other, a smaller piece, “Model for Teardrop — Monument to Being Earthbound,” comes with complications. Physically it consists of a dark round base with a glowing nylon teardrop — or a flame — floating above it, and it really is floating, held in midair by the force of electromagnets embedded in both the base and the form itself.
This piece, too, as seen in the show, is smaller than the artist originally envisioned it. Could it, too, be scaled up? Apparently there are no magnets strong enough to permit that, making this piece a monument designed to fail. But what is it a monument to? To the paradoxical dynamic that drives this artist’s finest work: rising, and falling, and rising. Living, and dying, and living. Can a tear and a flame coexist? Even be the same thing? In Ms. Denes’s world they can.
Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates
Through March 22 at the Shed, 545 West 30th Street, Manhattan; 646-455-3494, theshed.org.
Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factories
A pencil is a little wonder-wand: a stick of wood that traces the tiniest motions of your hand as it moves across a surface. I am using one now, making weird little loops and slashes to write these words. As a tool, it is admirably sensitive. The lines it makes can be fat or thin, screams or whispers, blocks of concrete or blades of grass, all depending on changes of pressure so subtle that we would hardly notice them in any other context. (The difference in force between a bold line and nothing at all would hardly tip a domino.) And while a pencil is sophisticated enough to track every gradation of the human hand, it is also simple enough for a toddler to use.
Such radical simplicity is surprisingly complicated to produce. Since 1889, the General Pencil Company has been converting huge quantities of raw materials (wax, paint, cedar planks, graphite) into products you can find, neatly boxed and labeled, in art and office-supply stores across the nation: watercolor pencils, editing pencils, sticks of charcoal, pastel chalks. Even as other factories have chased higher profit margins overseas, General Pencil has stayed put, cranking out thousands upon thousands of writing instruments in the middle of Jersey City.
Over the past few years, the photographer Christopher Payne visited the factory dozens of times, documenting every phase of the manufacturing process. His photographs capture the many different worlds hidden inside the complex’s plain brick exterior. The basement, where workers process charcoal, is a universe of absolute gray: gray shirts, gray hands, gray machines swallowing gray ingredients. A surprising amount of the work is done manually; it can take employees multiple days off to get their hands fully clean. Pencil cores emerge from the machines like fresh pasta, smooth and wet, ready to be cut into different lengths and dried before going into their wooden shells.
Other parts of the factory are eruptions of color. Red pencils wait, in orderly grids, to be dipped into bright blue paint. A worker named Maria matches the color of her shirt and nail polish to the shade of the pastel cores being manufactured each week. One of the company’s signature products, white pastels, have to be made in a dedicated machine, separated from every other color. At the tipping machine, a whirlpool of pink erasers twists, supervised patiently by a woman wearing a bindi.
Payne conveys the incidental beauty of functional machines: strange architectures of chains, conveyor belts, glue pots, metal discs and gears thick with generations of grease. He captures the strangeness of seeing a tool as simple as a pencil disassembled into its even simpler component parts. He shows us the aesthetic magic of scale. Heaps of pencil cores wait piled against a concrete wall, like an arsenal of gray spaghetti. Hundreds of pencils sit stacked in honeycomb towers. Wood shavings fly as fresh pencils are dragged across the sharpening machine, a wheel of fast-spinning sandpaper.
In an era of infinite screens, the humble pencil feels revolutionarily direct: It does exactly what it does, when it does it, right in front of you. Pencils eschew digital jujitsu. They are pure analog, absolute presence. They help to rescue us from oblivion. Think of how many of our finest motions disappear, untracked — how many eye blinks and toe twitches and secret glances vanish into nothing. And yet when you hold a pencil, your quietest little hand-dances are mapped exactly, from the loops and slashes to the final dot at the very end of a sentence.
Photographs like these do something similar. They preserve the secret origins of objects we tend to take for granted. They show us the pride and connection of the humans who make those objects, as well as a mode of manufacturing that is itself disappearing in favor of automation. Like a pencil, these photos trace motions that may someday be gone.
Collegiate Teaching 