Composing Landscapes Wherever You Are (Online Course) Fall 2024 w/ David Holt

September 15 to October 6 (Sundays), 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM, Eastern Time

**All sessions are live and will be recorded, students do not have to be present. All recordings will be available to students for 3 months after the final session, after 3 months the recording will be deleted.

Please check your email spam/junk folder for your Zoom invite.

DEMO: https://youtu.be/3iVmpXXhKIQ

Course Description

This online studio course will focus on effective ways of composing landscapes taking advantage of a variety of motifs and settings, from your own backyard to distant travel destinations. We will explore and practice a range of compositional strategies you can apply creatively to your own plein air painting or your work from reference photos or imagination. In addition to works by contemporary artists, we will examine works by artists from different historical periods, including some who focused on local settings, others who travelled widely,and some who created their own sense of place by working from memory and imagination. We will consider landscape paintings from both Western and Eastern traditions and the expressive roles of different materials and techniques. Our goal will be to help each participant get the most from their own chosen landscape sites and motifs.

Each weekly session will focus on different types of landscape themes and settings and involve the presentation and demonstration of specific concepts, compositional approaches, and techniques, along with instruction and feedback in applying these in your own work done during and between the sessions. You may work in any painting or drawing media.*

*(I am happy to provide lists of suggested materials for oil, acrylic, or watercolour/gouache media, as well as for drawing media if requested).

Examples from relevant artists, slideshows, videos, journal articles, bibliographic information, and other resources will be shared throughout the course.

Course Outline

Week 1 - Local Settings: From the Backyard to the Urban Landscape

How do artists capture a particular sense of place? We will explore site-specific strategies for composing landscape paintings using motifs and settings from houses and backyards to neighbourhood and urban settings, rural sites, and other locations. We will see how artists have creatively depicted domestic architecture through their handling of volumes in space and local and seasonal qualities of light. We will also consider visual ways in which nature becomes transformed in domestic environments.

Artists: Cezanne, Seurat, Bonnard, Giorgio Morandi, Chaim Soutine, Constant Permeke, Fausto Pirandello; Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, Romare Beardon, Fairfield Porter, Lois Dodd, Wolf Kahn, Joash Woodrow, Tom Fairs, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Hurvin Anderson. 1970s photorealist painters: Ed Ruscha, Ellsworth Kelly and photographers Robert Adams, Perla de Leon, Lee Friedlander, and others.

Practical lessons: Composing with planes in space, point of view, scale, perspective, movement, light, tone, and colour, geometry and pattern in domestic architecture, foliage, connections between painting and drawing strategies. Ideas and lessons from photographers.

Week 2 - Travel Abroad: The Grand Tour, Colonizing Landscapes, and Modern Tourist Destinations

How have artists represented iconic historical landmarks or regions, colonial locations, and “exotic” destinations? We will look at famous subjects and sites, topographical depictions, and the allure for artists of new and unfamiliar places. We will explore how images of cultural landmarks and geographical features can convey symbolic and social meanings, and consider the role of landscape imagery in colonization. The ongoing popularity of travel sketching and plein air painting will be seen against this background and also with regard to ideas about representing nature more generally.

Artists: Examples of 17 th -19 th century Italianate landscapes sketches: Thomas Jones, John Ruskin, Turner, and other 19 th century English watercolourists, Franz Kobell, the Macchiaioli, Rubens Santoro, Delacroix, Corot, Eugene Boudin, Canadian Group of Seven and associated painters: Frederic Church and the Hudson River School, Gauguin, Matisse, Albert Marquet, Jean Dubuffet, Raoul and Jean Dufy, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, John Singer Sargent, Georgia O’Keefe, Walter Sickert, David Bomberg, Dennis Creffield, John Hartman, Louis Kahn, and others.

Practical lessons: The veduta and the framing of architectural, landscape, and cityscape views, iconic, characteristic, and picturesque subjects, topographical versus pictorial concerns, colour/light relationships, incorporating local figures and motifs, plein air drawing and painting approaches.

Week 3 - Asian Landscape Painting: Historical Models, Famous Sites and Themes, Literary Interpretations, True View Painting Cross Cultural Influences

How do ideas about nature, time, movement, and specific places in Asian landscape painting differ from those in the West? How has landscape painting reflected Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist philosophical and spiritual concepts? We will explore the important role of early Chinese works in anchoring landscape painting traditions and principles. We will also consider notions about originality and innovation; observation and imagination; the expressive qualities of ink and the use of structural brushwork in both painting and calligraphy; and the importance of early printed painting manuals in codifying and circulating knowledge about painting theories, subjects, and techniques. Japanese and Korean examples will be examined along with Chinese works in order to observe influences and similarities and to help understand important differences. We will also look at the impact of Western perspective and landscape painting on Asian painting, including the recent assimilation of Western plein air practices. Orientalism and the influence of Asian landscape painting on Western artists will also be investigated.

Artists: examples from Chinese painters from the Song Dynasty to the present including Fan Kuan, Shen Zhou, Dong Quichang, Shitao, Huang Binhong, Chang Dia-chien, Fu Baoshi, Li Keran, C. C. Wang, Fang Zhaolin, Li Huasheng, Zao Wou-Ki, and others. Korean true view painters such as Jeong Seon (Chong Son), Japanese painters including Sesshu Toyo, Kano School, Hasegawa Tohaku, Edo Period painters Yosa Buson: Ike no Taiga, Uragami Gyokudo, and Tani Buncho, Giuseppe Castiglione, Van Gogh, Monet, Henri Michaux, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Brice Marden, and others.

Practical lessons: Six Principles of Chinese painting by Hseih Ho (ca. 550 CE); brushwork, energy, rhythm, tone, texture, scale, space; control/looseness, observation/imagination, tradition/innovation, relationships between painting and calligraphy, splashed ink and other “accidental” painting techniques, sacred mountains and scholars’ rocks, water, pavilions, foliage and figures, cartographic landscapes, Asian formats, including scrolls, albums, woodblock prints, and stone stele engravings.

Week 4 - Imaginary Landscapes: Inspirations and Syntheses

How do artists create personal landscape “worlds” from imagination, memory, or other sources? We will explore strategies for inventing poetic landscapes inspired not only by actual outdoor locations but also by art historical examples, archival photographs, travel memories, dreams, geology, and experimentation with materials and techniques. We will also investigate abstraction in landscape painting and ways in which visual elements can be expressively manipulated to create a sense of outdoor light land space.

Artists: Henri Rousseau, Giorgio De Chirico, Max Ernst, and other Surrealists, George Inness, Albert Ryder, Ralph Blakelock and other American Tonalists and Romantics, Samuel Palmer, Alfred Wallis, Ivon Hitchens, Peter Lanyon, Howard Hodgkin, Albert York, James Castle, Per Kirkeby, John Walker, Lucinda Parker, Gergory Amenoff, Elizabeth Cummings, Idris Murphy, and others.

Practical lessons: Frottage, decalcomania, and other and experimental painting strategies, space, colour, and light in abstract painting; nocturnal subjects, psychological and spiritual dimensions, personal vision.

Course Materials List

Participants in this course are free to work in media of their choice since the course is focused on concepts and compositional strategies rather than any particular painting or drawing technique. Tonality will be a major emphasis, as will colour temperature (warm/cool relationships), so there is no need for a large number of different colours on the palette beyond a primary triad (plus black and white). Drawing media that will allow for blocking in large tones will be helpful (charcoal, conté, pastel, ink wash, etc.).

Here are three suggestions for limited colour palettes for oil or acrylic paints:

1) 5 colours [vibrant] (white, black, and primaries to approximate CMYK palette. Some manufacturers have basic yellow, red, and blue primaries.)

1. Titanium white

2. Cadmium Yellow Light or Lemon Yellow

3. Cadmium Red Deep or Alizarin Crimson

4. Phthalo Blue

5. Mars Black or Ivory black

2) 5 colours [muted] earth based colours

1. Titanium White

2. Yellow Ochre

3. Venetian Red or Indian Red

4. Phthalo Blue, Ultramarine Blue, or Cobalt Blue

5. Mars Black

3) 10 colours (these will allow for matching nearly any colour you may encounter in painting from observation)

1. Titanium White

2. Cadmium Yellow Light

3. Yellow Ochre

4. Cadmium Red Light

5. Indian Red or Venetian Red

6. Alizarin Crimson

7. Ultramarine Blue

8. Phthalo Blue

9. Phthalo Green

10. Ivory Black or Mars Black

Also see Painting: Powers of Observation website entry devoted to oil painters’ palettes.

(Note the limited palettes of John Singer Sargent, Susan Lichtman, and Ken Kewley.)

http://www.powersofobservation.com/2009/01/painters-and-their-palettes.html

Watercolour or gouache colour palettes may use the same colours as above, with Chinese white and Payne’s grey for white and black. Readymade sets of tubes or pans (e.g. eight colors) will also be fine.

Solvents, mediums, additives, etc.

1. For acrylics and alkyds or other water-based oil paints, only water is needed.

2. For regular oil paint one may wish to use small amounts of a simple medium (e.g. stand oil/Gamsol) and non-toxic solvent for clean-up.

Supports

1. Participants may wish to work on stretched canvas, canvas panels, non stretched canvas, wooden panels, paper or other appropriate support (e.g. primed canvas for painting as needed for oils or acrylics). All water-based media may be used on unprepared paper of sufficient weight (e.g. watercolour paper).

Brushes

1. A handful of brushes of different sizes appropriate to the chosen media and scale of works will be needed.

   Be advised, it is always better to work with the largest brushes possible as a way of focusing attention on the

   relationships of large tonal areas and shapes rather than on detail, at least until the final stages of painting.

Palettes

1. For oil paint: disposable paper, wood, glass, plexi, etc.

2. For acrylics: disposable paper or other hard surface (even regular cardboard scraps can work well)

3. For watercolour or gouache: plastic or other palettes with indented areas of sufficient sizes for mixing colours

2 — Drawing materials

1. All participants will benefit from using sketchbooks or other drawing paper to make notes and quick sketches and studies. Softer grades of pencils (e.g. 4B, 6B), charcoal, conté, and/or pastels will allow for working with larger tonal areas in developing compositions.

2. Wet media (e.g. pen/brush with ink wash) can also be used

3. Some participants may wish to focus on using drawing rather than painting media throughout the course, which is fine. Any choices of drawing media will be supported and encouraged. If so, a variety of white and toned drawing papers will afford some variety and flexibility.

3 — Other general supplies

1. Portable pocket mirror or other mirror to see your work in progress in reverse

2. Paper towels, erasers, drawing boards, clips, palette knives, masking tape, non-toxic fixatives, etc. as needed

3. Containers for water and/or solvents as needed