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- IV. Teaching Personal Creative Expression- Painting Archetypes

Painting Archetypes 1.1 Opening  Art is personal. Yet it is crucial to avoid the stereotypical notion of inwardness as entirely idiosyncratic. – First as an artist then as a teacher I began to work through “archetypes.”[1] 1.2 “Looking at the European “old masters” you were probably first struck by their perceptual accuracy. Yet for the […]

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Living Art – V. Answering My Students

A Visual Artist Answers his students Student: What shaped you as a teacher? Avron: My personality as a teacher is rooted in my childhood….My father Isaac, mother Sofia and two of my uncles Moses and Raphael were painters. Isaac, Moses and Raphael were well known. They are characterized as “urban realists,”   “painters of the American […]

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A Dream of Reason V- Part 3 A Trip to Shadowland

A Trip to Shadowland (2003) When I was a graduate student, in the early 1960s, a professor told me about his research project. His task was to determine how the governing politicians could reassert control when they emerged after a nuclear war. (My doubt that this would be advisable was dismissed as “merely subjective.”) I […]

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Writings and Interviews by Avron Soyer

Reflections on life, paintings, theory, conversation.

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