Art Start: Fundamentals of the Studio, A Guidebook for Artmaking
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2020
Pages: 290
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2020
Pages: 290
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Art Start Fundamentals of the Studio: A Guidebook for Students in the Visual Arts immediately engages the reader with useful guidelines for effective art making. Foundation topics of composition, color, pictorial illusion, formalism, and sculptural space introduce the broad range of conceptual and technical skills necessary in the studio. Subsequent chapters describe the specific skills for working in various specialties, including drawing, painting, collage, mixed media, sculpture, and photography.
Art Start is presented in conversational and concise language, void of the redundancy and academic jargon of so many art textbooks. The author speaks directly to the reader with advice that can be readily applied to solving the visual problems of art making.
Brief chapters on the basics of art history encourage students to locate themselves in relation to their predecessors and contemporaries, and demonstrate how to use that exploration of history as an active resource for inspiring their personal artistic content.
Passages throughout the book demonstrate that a robust art education enriches everything else in life and that becoming visually literate is a worthy goal for everyone, not just the artist.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: How to Use This Book
Section I – Great Expectations: Looking, Thinking, and Knowing
Chapter 1. Looking at Art
Chapter 2. How Art Enhances Life
Chapter 3. Formalism Is All It Is Cracked Up to Be
Chapter 4. The Studio Critique
Chapter 5. Character of the Artist
Section II – Getting On with It: Key Studio Practices
Chapter 6. How to Make Good Two Dimensional Art
Chapter 7. Drawing on Necessity
Chapter 8. Figure Drawing: The Mirror of Humanity
Chapter 9. Notes on Painting
Chapter 10. Collage and Mixed Media
Chapter 11. Keeping a Journal Sketchbook
Section III – 2D and 3D Necessities: Spacing Out with True Colors
Chapter 12. Perspective
Chapter 13. The Color of Art
Chapter 14. Expanding Dimensions: Thinking and Making 3D Forms
Chapter 15. Abstraction, Representation, and Reality
Chapter 16. How to Evaluate the Quality of Abstract Art
Chapter 17. How to Make Abstract Art
Section IV – Taking the Dive: Actions Speak Louder Than Words
Chapter 18. An Artist’s Credo
Chapter 19. Studio Strategies for Art Making
Chapter 20. One Approach to Art Making
Chapter 21. Psychology, Procrastination, and Habit
Section V – Knowing Your Place: Understanding the Big Picture
Chapter 22. A Short Lesson in the Long History of Art
Chapter 23. One Artist and Modernism
Chapter 24. Art History Timeline
Chapter 25. The Outer Space of Pictorial Art
Section VI – Putting It Altogether (Or, Getting the Hang of It)
Chapter 26. The Portfolio
Chapter 27. Presentation: Mats and Frames
Chapter 28. The Artist’s Statement
Chapter 29. Artist’s Statement—Dennis Lick
Chapter 30. My Portfolio
Section VII – Art Making with Direction
Chapter 31. Introduction to Studio Projects and Exercises
Chapter 32. Independent Projects
Chapter 33. How to Take Better Photographs
Section VIII – Speaking of Art: The Verbal and the Visual
Chapter 34. Quotations: Portable Ponderables
Chapter 35. Art, Education, and Life Thereafter
Chapter 36. Bibliography: Suggestions for Reading and Looking
I began teaching in the visual arts at Middlesex as an adjunct in 1974, immediately after earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at Rutgers. I pursued undergraduate work at Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. While currently an Associate Professor, I began full-time as an instructor in 1976. I have taught a wide range of studio courses, including art fundamentals 2D & 3D, drawing, painting, sculpture, and introduction to art for both art majors and elective students.
In addition, I have had full-time experience teaching art at the elementary level, K-6, in the years between Miami and Rutgers. I appreciate the importance of childhood experience as it enhances expression for both children and art professionals. Art is the way to educate the mind’s eye so that the informed observer can gain the richest experiences from daily contact with the outside world. As an artist-educator I am pleased to play a role in the development of a student’s emerging awareness that he/she can express the visual meaning of experience by manipulating the raw materials of art making.
In the 1970s I was a founding member of the artists’ cooperative Amos Eno Gallery in Soho, New York City, when artist run galleries were a pioneering movement. I have exhibited a wide range of art works in various venues throughout the metropolitan area and my work is in museum and private collections in New Jersey, Washington DC, and California.