Painting Class
PAINTING AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN FRANCE includes a course in drawing and painting, taught by SEYMOUR SIMMONS III. The course is designed for all ages and levels of experience, from true beginners to advanced artists :
Participants typically work from observation. However, individual approaches vary, from realistic to abstract, impressionistic to expressionistic, even surrealist! Toward these ends, the course develops students’ creativity, using traditional and contemporary methods, like keeping a sketchbook, following a ‘creative process,’ researching artists of the past and present, seeking individual sources of inspiration, exploring diverse compositional ideas, experimenting with media, and writing reflections and self-evaluations. These activities are pursued through the use of a SKETCHBOOK, which is also used to record the trip.
The course includes GROUP INSTRUCTION, combined with opportunities for PEER CRITIQUE and ONE-ON-ONE discussions with the instructor. Students choose drawing or painting media, although demonstrations primarily involve pencil and charcoal for drawing, and transparent watercolor techniques for painting.
Another important part of the course is visiting the glorious ART MUSEUMS of France, including the LOUVRE and ORSAY, for group discussions and study. In front of the original works, we explore the artists’ style, how they organize their compositions, evoke emotion through tone and color, create a sense of 3-dimensional space on a 2-dimensional surface, and the techniques they used. We also study artists’ drawings and sketchbooks, alongside their finished works, to discover their own creative processes.
Participants then apply these skills, as we sketch and take photographs throughout Paris and go on to develop more finished work in Normandy and the Jura.
GOALS of the course :
- Keep a SKETCHBOOK to develop ideas and record experiences and reflections
- Improve OBSERVATIONAL skills applied to landscape, still-life, interiors, as well as figures and portraiture
- Expand TECHNIQUES in drawing and painting media
- Apply COMPOSITIONAL principles and improve composition planning
- Cultivate INDIVIDUAL styles and approaches
- Develop CREATIVITY through problem-solving and following a creative process.
SKETCHBOOKING
Keeping a sketchbook is a major aspect of the trip for painters and non-painters, alike. Throughout history, artists, designers, and people in many other creative fields kept sketchbooks as “tools of the mind,” through which they developed ideas, recorded events, and reflected on their experiences. Sketchbooks therefore contain not just sketches, but photographs, written words, pieces of music, mathematical calculations, found objects, and whatever else seems of value. In this way, these books do more than just record the trip; they become a means to get more out of it, both by enhancing daily experience, and by drawing upon those experiences to generate new creative ideas for future development.
Following our friend and fellow Painting in France teacher, BARBARA STECHER, whose book, Sketchbooking, we use, participants can start their sketchbook before even leaving home to document their preparation, as well as their thoughts and feelings about what is to come. Sketchbooking can be continued while traveling and throughout the workshop — all the way to the return flight home. In between, we will use the sketchbook as a key part of the painting course.
SEYMOUR SIMMONS Biography
Seymour Simmons III is an Associate Professor of Art and Art Education at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He and his wife, Martine, have taken painting groups to France for more than 25 years. Seymour has a B.F.A. in Printmaking from Colorado State University, as well as Master and Doctorate degrees in Education from Harvard, where his focus was on art education and the education of artists.
While at Harvard, he was a researcher at Harvard Project Zero with Dr. Howard Gardner, developer of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Seymour co-authored Drawing: The Creative Process, with Marc S. A. Winer (Simon and Schuster, 1977), and has published numerous articles.
As well as teaching undergraduate and graduate students at the university level, Seymour Simmons has taught adults at the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Center for Adult Education, De Cordova Museum (Lincoln, MA), and Radcliffe College Seminars program, as well as in France. He has also taught gifted and talented teenagers and younger children. His teaching and research interests include the philosophical aspects of drawing instruction, holistic arts education, and the creative process. He has worked as an illustrator and designer, as well as an exhibiting artist, with focuses on landscape, the figure, and portraiture.
For more information, including examples of work by Seymour and his students, visit his website: seymoursimmons.com
