IFINE 3295 Large Scale Painting Projects
This course will operate as a working studio course where large scale painting projects are assigned that involve specific formal problems, process challenges and conceptual innovations. Students will be required to produce a single large-scale painting per assignment. While the assignments will be uniform and genre specific (grand-scale figuration/narration, abstraction through observation and large-scale portraiture and the process and formal challenges the same, it is anticipated that each student will produce a unique solution expanding on their personal vision and formal investigations unique to their pursuits and potential. Enveloping the viewer and dominating interior spaces, large scale paintings create an impact. Artists and their patrons have utilized size and scale to display power and prestige to impress their audiences and show painting skills and prowess. In 18th century Europe, history painting was considered to be the most important genre, above portraiture, still life, and landscape, and thus was executed on bigger canvases by artists like Jacques-Louis David and Benjamin West. Inspired by their the large-scale public murals for the Work Progress Administration (WPA), abstract expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner painted on large scale canvases that could take up entire walls, interpreted by some to represent the freedom of American expression. Contemporary artists such as Chuck Close, Jenny Saville, Kerry James Marshall have employed scale as a major component in their formal investigations. Kehinde Wiley amongst many other have employed monumental portraits of young black men in scenes and poses appropriated from western art history to critique and reclaim the identity politics of the genre. Students in this class will expand from these contexts to develop individual work adding to the conceptual discourse and critique of large scale painting.