For this interdisciplinary class, Ox-Bow’s wintry landscape serves as a metaphor and inspiration for thinking about the cycle of death and rebirth, as emblematized in the Greek myth of Persephone and Hades. As with this myth, art has long served as a way to make meaning of the difficult and unknowable aspects of human existence. The experience and process of mourning, the desire to transcend death, and beliefs about the afterlife are reflected in the history of art. Through studio projects, readings, screenings, lectures and group discussions, this course examines differing understandings of death across time and cultures, mourning and loss, putrefaction and entropy as formal strategies, melancholic relationships to the past, and the supernatural. Materials and considerations of media are individually driven in consultation with the instructors.

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This course for beginning through advanced students includes experimentation with materials and techniques through individual painting and drawing problems. Students pursue various interests in figure, landscape, abstract imaginary, and still-life painting. Oil painting with odorless solvents are encouraged; students may also choose to work with water-based media, drawing materials., or mixed media combinations. Demonstrations and critiques included.

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This multilevel painting course will investigate painting as a form of language, where color, surface, and marks are considered as indicative of narrative. Students will consider questions such as: how do light, space, and color suggest narrative? How do surface and mark-making direct the reading of a painting, and how can meaning morph based on context? Using direct observation of the landscape as a jumping off point, students will be encouraged to work from other sources, such as memory and photographs. We will also examine painting in both contemporary and historical contexts. Oil paint will be supported, with demonstrations on techniques and material properties of oil. However, other media such as watercolor, gouache, and acrylic will also be supported for multi-level students.

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This class will focus on issues raised in painting, particularly portraits and self-portraits, translating what is known and seen into the formal vocabulary of paint. Sources will include direct observation of the subject and the imagination. Students will investigate form and content as well as materials and techniques. Students may choose to work with oil-based media with odorless solvents, or water-based media. Slide lectures and critiques will be included.

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Drawing upon the natural terrain of Ox-Bow, students explore drawing, design, composition and creativity. A wide variety of drawing materials are used. Slide lectures, critiques, and meetings with visiting artists are included each evening.

Note to parents of Pre-College students: All Pre-College students are required to reside on campus during the course. Students are chaperoned and rules and regulations are strictly enforced. An adult chaperone is housed with Pre-College students throughout the week. Students must provide their own transportation to and from Ox-Bow. Pre-College students are not allowed to have vehicles on campus.

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This course for beginning and advanced students will include extensive experimentation with pastels, one of the most sensuous of drawing mediums. The more blended the traditional techniques and the more aggressive physical contemporary techniques that use pastel as a bridge between drawing and painting will be explored. Drawing exercises will emphasize figure/ground, composition and color while pursuing various subject matters, including landscape, still life and the modern portrait as developed by Degas. The course will include critiques, demonstrations, and discussion of contemporary and modern masters use of this medium (Picasso, Joan Mitchell, Paula Rego, Kitaj.)

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This multi level course is designed to expand students command of both craft and content through individually developed painting projects. The course is geared toward developing your painting practice as an artist beyond the classroom environment. Discussion will center on how your choices of format, materials, image and contextual alignment all inform the reading of your work. Painting is actualized through a free or creative relationship to pictorial space and the historical context in which it is produced. The literal space of the canvas support acts as a field in which the issues pertaining to the armature of the medium are played out along side the imagery of the chosen subject.
From deep space to the abstract surface of the support itself, space becomes the cue as to how the picture is interpreted. Issues of transport, duration, and plausibility are acted out as a methodology for understanding the position of the painting. The course will include extensive experimentation with techniques and imagery through individual painting problems. All mediums are accepted and experimentation with formal and material options as part of the painting process in relation to form and meaning will be stressed.
Students will pursue various interests in subject matter around the issues of space and facture. Lectures and critiques will be included.

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This course guides students through various operations and situations that employ provocation and the implementation of memory as both process and subject. Exercises and demos explore forms in motion, indirect visual sources, narrative reminiscences, poetic language, time, and spatial operations. Test and experiments are conducted in order to trigger unexpected and non-habituated painterly actions. As intuition becomes the source for knowledge the edicts of reason are tossed aside and painterly inventions emerge. Students with an advanced painting practice are encouraged to enroll in this course.

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A multi-level studio course in which students will experiment with a variety of dry and water based media through individual perceptions of the extraordinary variety of landscape at Ox-Bow. Demonstrations, slide presentations, critiques, and discussion of issues pertinent to contemporary and historical modes of landscape will be included.

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