Syllabus for Angels Flight Plein Air Workshop August 2012

Demos -- "Gesture and Calligraphic Brushwork"

         

 

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1. Composition: Key ideas

2. Color: Key ideas

 

 

Description of Workshop:

This workshop will explore gesture and calligraphic brushwork in painting.

Partiipants will learn they do not have to have a careful pencil or charcoal sketch before you begin to paint. Instead, demos will show how to begin placing dabs of paint around the canvas as the first line of attack. This produces a “macchia” or pattern that becomes the “seed” of the final production. Moreover, this can be done quickly so the macchia "seed" is fresh and spontaneous.

View from Angel Flight Road

The Instructor:

Jerry Ross studied at the Buffalo Art Institute. He has taught classes for the University of Oregon, Maude Kerns Art Center, DIVA, and a series of plein air workshops. He specializes in portraits, figurative work, cityscapes, and landscapes. He has won awards in Italy in painting competitions there (Livergnano and Milan) and has exhibited widely in Italy (Milan, Bologna, Rome, Florence) and travels to paint there frequently. His style is naturalistic yet informed by abstraction.

Driving instructions will be provided to class registrants..

More Examples of Jerry's Work:

 

Statement by Robyn G. Peterson, Executive Director, Yellowstone Art Museum (2011):

Whether you approach today's art from the perspective of the "traditional" or the "progressive" camp, Ross's work is worth a close look. Personally, I am drawn to Ross's devotion to the craft of painting and how that plays out in his portraits. The uncanny ability of a painted portrait--in the hands of a skilled and thoughtful observer such as Ross--to convey the essence of a personality convinces me that painting will never be dead, no matter how often that proclamation is made. Here is an artist for whom art world fashion is irrelevant, yet whose work speaks of its own time and place. Wordorder (talk) 15:42, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Statement by Clarice Zdanski, artist and art historian, professor

Even a brief look at his work reveals very close links with the aims and techniques of the Macchiaioli, an Italian school of painting associated with a group of artists who met at the Caffè Michelangelo in Florence around 1860. The Macchiaioli style can very approximately be described as a form of pre- or proto-Impressionism in which macchie, the Italian word for blotches or dabs, are used boldly, rejecting drawing and form in favour of overall effect. Like ‘Impressionism’, the name ‘Macchiaioli’ became ‘official’ after a critic of the Italian newspaper the Gazzetta del Popolo used the term to deride the style’s wilfully sketchy, indefinite qualities. Like many nineteenth century art movements, the Macchiaioli advocated an anti-academic form of painting that aimed to reproduce ‘un impressione del vero’ (Fattori (1)) , which is perhaps best left in Italian because it loses so much of its resonance when translated into English. In terms of art techniques, il vero can mean life, as in disegnare dal vero, life drawing or working from life. Here there are links with en plein air painting, another of the great revolutions in art in the nineteenth century. However, il vero is also the truth.

Send deposit to: Jerry Ross, 203 W. 52nd Ave, Eugene, OR 97405

 

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