Drawing Place in Watercolor & Gouache
with Carrie Gundersdorf
$100 Lab Fee | August 9–15 | Exploratory
Watercolor is historically associated with observation of the natural world, through works such as botanical and wildlife illustrations, J. M. W. Turner’s ethereal landscapes, Charles Burchfield’s transcendental images, and Joseph Yoakum’s reminisced locations. This course will help students build a basic understanding of the materials associated with both transparent watercolor and opaque watercolor (gouache)—paint, brushes, and paper—as well as the techniques: layering washes, working wet into wet, and using the white of the paper to create color. This course celebrates the ease and transportability of working in watercolor and gouache and brings the landscape into the studio. In addition to using the Ox-Bow environment as a source of subject matter, we will look at past and contemporary artists, including John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, Dawn Clements, Amy Sillman, and Josephine Halvorson. Exercises involving color, observation, and mark-making will help familiarize students with the medium. The class will enable students to build a personal approach to working with the idea of place.
This course is available for non-credit only.
Carrie Gundersdorf (she/her) is an artist and educator whose paintings and drawings reference early modernist art and images of natural and astronomical phenomena. The watercolor technique of layering transparent colors is central to both her drawing and painting practices. Gundersdorf has had solo exhibitions at La Loma Projects, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Drew University, Madison, NJ. Her work has been featured in group shows at 106 Green, New York; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; La Box, Bourges, France; and the Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, among others. The recipient of a 2025 Individual Support Grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Gundersdorf has also received the Artadia Award and the Bingham Fellowship to study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been reviewed in ArtReview, Artforum, Artnet, Art on Paper, the Chicago Tribune, and Time Out Chicago. She earned her BA from Connecticut College and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.