Fall 2010. Night Painting. PA-220-2.
7:30-10:15 pm, Tuesday/Thursday, Studio 115.

Goal:
This course it at night because at night you can keep going until you drop—there are no other classes/interferences to break the on-going spell of your work. This course is not for making paintings to show in galleries or to build a career; it is for those for whom painting is or will be the way to say and find their lives—and at night we find the deepest things.

In the last hundred or so years, painting has become a solitary thing—we have few friends or guides in today’s art world of passing commercial entertainment. That is why it is important for us to know painters who have gone before us and have met some of the problems our future may bring. There will be a 15-20 minute lecture in the studio about such painters at 7:30 on most Tuesday nights. Attendance is required.

Like athletics, painting is a physical act, the more we do it the more we learn—not only about painting but also about ourselves. The semester is fifteen weeks long, and so not less than fifteen works of art—paintings, suites of drawings, studio journals—will be required to pass the course. The first week of October, November and December will be a critique of the previous month’s work so that we can all see what has been accomplished during the month. Attendance is required.

Required to Pass:

• There will be a 15-20 minute lecture in the studio at 7:30 on most Tuesday nights. See next page for schedule. Attendance is required.
• Not less than fifteen works of art—paintings, suites of drawings, studio journals—will be required to pass the course. There will be a critique of the month’s work at the end of each four weeks of the semester. See schedule next page with special notes about preparing for the critiques. Attendance is required.

What you should have when it’s over…

• A sharing of your favorite painters with others in the class, and an enlargement of your own knowledge of the history and contemporary condition of painting.
• A working sense of the “Contemporary Dialog” and your place in it.
• Fifteen significant works of art.

For details about the lectures and web versions of some of them, go to

www.fredmartin.net and click Art Histories

 Course Schedule (subject to change as the course progresses).

Tuesday, September 1. Introduction to the course.
Thursday September 3. Bring one or two of your most recent works. Be prepared to talk about why you used your medium and your strengths and weaknesses in it, and what message did you want to send (and can you say it and should you say it?)
Tuesday, September 8. Artemesia Gentileschi’s Letter to the Future.
Tuesday September 15. Edvard Munch and Sex and Death.
Tuesday September 22. No lecture. Use the time to further prepare for next week’s End of Month Review.

October 2-4 will be the end of September Review.
Present four works, with a handout with a paragraph about one or two painters that matter to your work and that we should know about. Bring a couple of books or magazines with images of their work.
Tuesday October 6. Vasily Kandinsky and The Spiritual in Art.
Tuesday October 13. Franz Marc and “Only the animals are pure.”
Tuesday, October 20. Max Beckmann and the wars
Tuesday, October 27. No lecture. Use the time to further prepare for next week’s End of Month Review.

November 3-5 will be the end of October Review.
Read one or more of the cover articles of each of the last five issues of ArtForum, Art News or Art in America. Why did this artist or exhibition matter to this critic for each of these exhibitions? Try to extract the most important critical terms, positive or negative, in use today. Now, write a paragraph applying these terms to the work you will present in the review. How do these terms apply to your work, and if not, why not? Justify yourself and your relationship to the “contemporary dialog.” Give copies of your paragraph to the class when you present your work in the review.
Tuesday November 10. Think about “Structure.” What it is and why it matters to what you want to say.
Tuesday November 17. Georg Grosz and the workers and after.
Tuesday November 24. A movie about artists.
Thursday November 26. Thanksgiving Day, no class.

Tuesday December 1. No lecture.
Use the time to further prepare for next week’s End of Semester Review.
Thursday December 3 and Tuesday December 8. End of Semester Review.
Present one work each from the first and second reviews, along with four new works from the last four weeks. Is there a progression?. Be prepared to talk about it.

Thursday December 10. Class party.