Living Art I. An Invitation

An Invitation Opening 1.1 Writing is surprisingly different from face-to-face art teaching: no colors, gestures or voices. One must “spell it out”. I write because I love art and because I noticed I am old. 1.2 I teach at The New School and The Educational Alliance. I also teach recovering drug addicts and people who […]

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 Living Art- II. Teaching Pattern- Reconstructing the Human Figure…

Reconstructing the Human Figure as a Unity, and Sensitivity to Implicit Movement   1.Opening Most of these exercises apply to both painting and drawing. I usually begin with drawing because one can’t learn everything at once. Yet I found that if one waits more than three classes to introduce painting some students implicitly identify the […]

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II. Teaching Pattern- Two Figurative Approaches, Working with Local Color

Two Figurative Approaches 1.Opening I am uneasy about sharing some highly specific and detailed techniques. They can be very helpful in seeing and sensitively articulating patterns. Yet unlike most suggestions in this essay (e.g., drawing the figure as a unity, sensitivity to warm and cool colors, openness to archetypical themes) they are not relevant to […]

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III. Art Words- Art, Inwardness, and Processes and Procedures

What is Art? Opening In class, with its speech, gestures, charcoal, oil paint, oil pastel, flowers, naked bodies and paintings, one can leave implicit much that in writing should be “spelled out.” Some of the concepts and terms here have long complex interdisciplinary histories. Yet our only concern is to clarify art teaching. If we […]

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Living Art- III. Art Words- Prisms of Language

Visual Meaning and Prisms of Language 1. Painting directly explores visual meaning. We live directly in our senses. Yet we do not exist in isolation, cut off, in a vacuum. No one creates the world anew out of nothing. All personal experience is a variation on human universal themes. Each person’s experienced worl­d is inexhaustible. […]

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Living Art- III. Art Words- Structural Distinctions

Structural Distinctions 1.Drawing and Painting 1.1. Opening The usual distinction between painting and drawing is presence or absence of color. I accept this as a minimal distinction. Yet the artist needs more. Drawing and painting both create shapes. – Pure drawing outlines. It translates the idea of boundary into black line. – Painting works from […]

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Writings and Interviews by Avron Soyer

Reflections on life, paintings, theory, conversation.

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