Mural Project Completed!

When I took this One-Year Appointment to teach art at TMCC in Reno, I was asked if I could paint and teach a mural project that had been proposed, the first ever at TMCC.  I have experience painting murals from years ago, so I was excited to take it on.  The theme as proposed was to create a "Nevadan Landscape", and my original four students worked together to interpret what that could mean.  See this post!  Through numerous studies we came up with a final composition that our President and her cabinet approved.  Over the next 3 months, the original students, a handful of local volunteer artists, and I executed this massive mural.  It was a wonderful collaborative effort.



Here are the finished photographs of this 45' long X 12' high artwork, permanently on display in TMCC's Student Center.  In the process, I learned so much about this place!  The mural is a cultural and physical timeline of the surrounding area, starting at far left with the native legend of the Stone Mother at Pyramid Lake at dawn.  The viewer then progresses through day and several state plants and animals, including a Bristle Cone Pine, Big Horn Sheep, Wild Horses and others.  We also have a representation of the Black Rock Desert and the coyote as the symbol of the native fire bearer and the modern day Burning Man Art Festival.  Through the main body of the mural we have landscapes and cultural elements depicting the Truckee Meadows area around the college, including a view of downtown Reno from the hill that TMCC sits on.  Here we included past, contemporary and futuristic elements, from the 19th-century train referencing the trans-continental line running through here and a more futuristic image of a quickly growing and changing Reno.  Reno is best seen at night from the hill, so we transitioned into night and ascended up into the Sierra Nevada mountains and a moonlit sky at upper right.  We finished the lower right and the visual end of our mural with ancient petroglyphs found further south in Nevada, and this allowed for a creative signing ceremony.  We dipped our hands in paint and left our stamps like some of the old cave painting artists.  There is so much more rich conceptual detail if one studies the numerous smaller elements we worked in. 

Already the mural is making a noticeable impact.  Gallery attendance is up as the formerly dark corner of the large student center is visually ignited and many students notice the area for the first time.  Staff and visitors constantly tell me how much we have captured the character of Truckee Meadows and the surrounding area.  It seems to be well-liked by everyone I have talked to, and is a source of pride around the college.  I am so proud of my students and this project, and am grateful to have the chance to develop and teach this incredibly unique class!

The Synergy of Art and Music

Also in my first semester at TMCC, I have brought my live quartet project in for my Life Drawing class here!  I reached out to the community and found a well-respected symphony quartet, The String Beings.  They were very excited to perform for us.  We happen to have a great area to do this in- the main hall of the Student Center right in front of our in-progress mural!  As expected, it was a huge event, with students and faculty crowding around to take the event in.  Several even tried their hands at drawing with the tables and art supplies we provided.

My interview post-event.

Mural Class!

I haven't had any time to post since I took this full time job out in Reno at Truckee Meadows Community College, but I'd like to update a bit of what has been happening.  When I took the job, they needed someone to take over the mural grant they had just won.  The grant called for a mural artist to teach a class, developing the mural from concept to finish.  I have mural painting experience from years ago, and have made some pretty big drawings recently, so it was a class I felt confident I could teach!  The site is in the main hall of the Student Center, sized 12 feet high X 45 feet long, in a heavy traffic area.  It is also the wall where the main campus art gallery is, as the grant writers wanted to emphasize its entrance and draw attention to it.

The first task with my 4 students was to brainstorm compositional elements.  The theme as the grant was written was to create a Nevadan Landscape.  I taught the students about the early stages of mural planning and development, and they taught me about the amazing and inspiring local landscape.  After bringing together numerous photographs, research, sketches and paintings of various elements, we built four of these mock-ups.  They are built to scale, based off of building blueprints and we drew and painted directly on them.  This is a way to easily plan the composition of such a huge project, as well as develop color structures, and deal with architectural elements that we had to work around.

The President of the College, who in the grant was to help dictate what the mural would have and would ultimately make the final choice, asked us for three compositions to choose from.  Instead of assigning a mock-up to each student, I had the students work collaboratively on developing them.  I did this so that as student's strengths and interests revealed themselves, I knew which ones I could assign major parts to as we went through these into the main execution.  I told students that this is where some of the most important work lied, as once the composition was set in form and imagination, it would make it easier to tackle the main mural.  We took our three best to meet with the President and her cabinet for final approval.  After a brief introduction I let the students do the presenting.  President Hilgersom and her staff absolutely loved what we had developed, and we took notes as they combined elements of the different ones they liked best.  With that, we were approved!

We were underway!  We took our compositional plans and applied them directly to the walls.  The students were surprised at how fast it started out!

 












We worked until the end of the semester developing the major compositional elements.  I taught mural painting techniques as we went, and have helped quite a bit with the painting.  Now in the the Spring semester of 2018, we will continue work, hopefully making our plan for a big reveal with a formal lighting in late March!

Drawn to Creating: A Survey of Contemporary Drawing

That was one of the most profound experiences of my young artistic career so far; walking in to the exhibition I spent a year curating.  It was amazing to see the work of so many talented and hard-working artists from around the country.   As I expected, the work was far better in person, where you could see the scale, physical textures, and sense of their making.  Curating an exhibition is not unlike the making of a piece of art itslef, and I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment with this show!

Add to that, giving a talk to almost 200 people about the nature and importance of drawing in art, how crucial it is to see art in person, and the meditative, intuitive and intellectual nature of making this work, I was able to discuss my curatorial efforts.  For the scale of the show (11 artists, 44 works) it covered a wide path of the possible ways one could make a drawing.

To round it all out, giving interviews to three local news sources, rubbing elbows with the president of the college, and connecting with the incredibly inquisitive and kind students and faculty of Susquehanna University I think I made some important friends and connections.  And having one of the visitors tell me one of my drawings reminded her of the Bernini sculptures she had seen recently in Italy helped make my own artistic efforts more meaningful.

 

Winter '17 Semester-Ending Highlights!

Here are some of the highlights from the classes I taught in this winter semester!

In Drawing II we finished the semester with pastel still lifes.  We spent three weeks on them, studying composition, proportions, value structure, and of course- full chroma.  This followed work with colored pencil, seen below, and this Pastel Abstraction Project.

There were three still lifes around the room giving students choices of subject matter, and opportunities for the best views.  All are on Canson neutral-tone 19"X25" pastel paper, with a few students choosing to work on professional-level sanded papers.  Yes, that is a real deer skull I found for them to draw!

















Just before we went into pastel we spent three weeks on different homework and in-studio colored pencil projects.  I like to teach it on toned papers, so the students are not fighting white through the process.  I taught them the most important color theories as we went along.

This was a pinned-up still life they did at home.



I asked them to make thumbnail studies on the back of the paper they had chosen to layout the composition and the color scheme based on the color combination possibilities we studied.



Colored pencil, when used with proper techniques, can render very realistic textures and colors!







And in the studio we did natural and heightened color studies.
















Before we went into color we had our Figure Drawing section with live models.  Two weeks of gesture, proportions, foreshortening and value.  I just got them warmed up for my favorite class- Life Drawing in the fall!

Gestures!  2-5 minutes.









Sighting for proportions and angles, 30 mins.





Foreshortening studies, 40 mins.









And then a two-day pose for a full value drawing on neutral-toned paper.  They are more than ready for a full semester of Life Drawing in the fall!









Meanwhile, we were making prints in Intro to Studio Art...  Yes, that is the same deer skull!  He is a great model.









Earlier in Drawing II we had a few design-based projects that focused on composition among other more advanced drawing principles.

First up was our Tiny Drawing, Big Paper Project, where I gave students the challenge of composing a dynamic composition in a 4" square.  Rives paper for it's delicate surface and graphite for its strong rendering abilities were used, as we worked to make pieces that would draw the viewer in.  They certainly did once they were in the showcases!







Then these compositional diptychs.







And then these really neat collage drawings, where I asked them to collage dissimilar images and connect them through drawing!





But perhaps my favorite project exploring composition is this frottage project.  Here we studied texture through rubbing over different objects and textures, and them worked back into them to create a cohesive abstract image.  Often some student's first exploration of abstraction!  Really beautiful works in person.







But what Drawing II is complete without a little 3-point perspective?  In one of my classes we designed our own viaducts according to 3-point theory.





And in my other Drawing II we went to the Ann Arbor Natural History Museum to study 3-point from observation!  Staircases, a rotunda, and a bridge with views down on all the displays.  One student even braved the cold spring days to draw Albert Kahn's beautifully-designed triangular facade.   A hard subject to beat to study space and linear perspective.










And we started the whole semester where we eventually left off, with extended still lifes.  Here we used a combination of conte crayon and charcoal to look at some warm/cool color relationships.  Yes, the deer skull hung around a lot!  these helped prepare the students for the pastel work we eventually did.  They were done in the first few weeks of Drawing II and started this great overall semester!











And a few Final Projects exploring conceptual and material exploration to round it all out!  Including an invisible ink drawing, a self-portrait, an installation, and a multi-dimensional drawing.  We covered a huge range for a single semester!