Kaylee Rae Wyant

In this course, students will focus their interests and refine their skills to create strong, portfolio-quality work. This advanced course is intended for students with previous drawing and/or painting experience who are ready to experiment, take risks, and push their skills to the next level. The organization of ideas and development of self-directed work is emphasized with instructor guidance and peer support. Students explore contemporary artistic practices through interdisciplinary approaches that cultivate material exploration, image-making strategies, and traditional and non-traditional drawing and painting techniques. Led by their individual projects and goals, students may work in various media, such as water-based paint, oil paint, ink, pencil, charcoal, collage, or a combination of media. Trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, contemporary artist presentations, group critiques, daily writing exercises, and class discussions supplement the studio experience.

NOTE: Painting and/or drawing experience and ability to work independently required. Students are encouraged to bring a digital camera, tablet, and/or laptop for homework/research and after-studio hours projects.

In this course, students will focus their interests and refine their skills to create strong, portfolio-quality work. This advanced course is intended for students with previous drawing and/or painting experience who are ready to experiment, take risks, and push their skills to the next level. The organization of ideas and development of self-directed work is emphasized with instructor guidance and peer support. Students explore contemporary artistic practices through interdisciplinary approaches that cultivate material exploration, image-making strategies, and traditional and non-traditional drawing and painting techniques. Led by their individual projects and goals, students may work in various media, such as water-based paint, oil paint, ink, pencil, charcoal, collage, or a combination of media. Trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, contemporary artist presentations, group critiques, daily writing exercises, and class discussions supplement the studio experience.

NOTE: Painting and/or drawing experience and ability to work independently required. Students are encouraged to bring a digital camera, tablet, and/or laptop for homework/research and after-studio hours projects.

Painting Practice is an introductory painting course offering. The curriculum addresses basic skills as related to a painting studio practice. Topics and curricular goals include material, facility and technique, space and color, as well as concept. This course is a prerequisite for all Multi-level Painting, Figure Painting and Advanced Painting Studio classes.

This course invites students to become collectors. Looking at the personal collections of artists like Georgia O¿Keeffe, Ray Yoshida, Christina Ramberg, and Roger Brown, students will learn how to use the act of collecting as a tool for invention in their studio practices. With class excursions to flea markets, museums, and nature trails, students will have multiple opportunities to gather and document a range of visual ephemera. Course activities will center on the development of visual archives, including developing strategies for collecting, documenting, organizing, and displaying material. Students will keep a sketchbook/journal with writings and drawings of collected material. Weekly drawing exercises will help synthesize their observations to develop a unique visual vocabulary. By asking students to, as Barbara Rossi put it, ¿notice themselves noticing the world,¿ collecting becomes a strategy for self-reflection as well as a means for developing thoughtful connections to the material world around them.

Looking to the legacy of Surrealism as a strategy for contemporary painting, this course explores how intuitive processes and the unconscious can spark visual invention. Students will experiment with techniques such as automatism, collage, decalcomania, frottage, and the transformation of found objects to generate unexpected imagery. The class will study well-known Surrealist works at the Art Institute and also examine the movement's significant international and cross-generational impact, considering non-Western artists, the inclusion of women, contemporary artists, and many Chicago-based painters. Through exercises in intuitive abstraction and hybrid imagery, students will learn to harness chance, ambiguity, and the uncanny as tools for expression.