I think that, just like there are lots of art worlds, there are lots of art markets. There are certain parts of the art market that, of course, don’t need institutional validation. They’re on their own, they do their own thing. 

•  http://hyperallergic.com/74330/the-new-casualists-strike-again/

busy go-betweens paising as adorable a beauty only glimpsed through veils; they provoke an irresistible desire in us for the original

Composition, the aim of which should be expression, is modified according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of a given size, my drawing will have a necessary relationship to its format. I would not repeat this drawing on another sheet of different proportions, for example, rectangular instead of square.

But I am beginning to feel like we don't offer enough instruction before we let folks loose. Sophomore painting has been pretty rigorously taught here for a while. But after that you're basically on your own...

It's time to change all that.

Here is where I am going to work on ideas for assignments that suit Advanced painting that are more rigorous than, "Okay...make a painting" I appreciate any advice current or past students can offer...thanks in advance!

• Pre-modern: Colors made from ochres, metals (lead, especially), or other naturally occurring materials which may have been manipulated in some ways (heating, for example). This would be a good time to talk about alchemy and James Elkin's What Painting Is.

• Modern: These are colors that began to appear in the 19th century - Mauve, Prussian Blue, etc. Chemical colors that were not possible before the industrial revolution. Cadmiums would go in this group.

• Contemporary: These are colors that have become available in the last 30 years. They would include more lightfast fluorescent pigments, cadmium substitutes, etc.

ABSTRACT

Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (for example, time, space, colour, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing about its relation to human communication. We first show that across a sample of ~1,000 languages, there is broad variation in how densely languages encode information into words. Second, we show that this language information density is associated with a denser configuration of semantic information. Finally, we trace the relationship between language information density and patterns of communication, showing that informationally denser languages tend towards faster communication but conceptually narrower conversations or expositions within which topics are discussed at greater depth. These results highlight an important source of variation across the human communicative channel, revealing that the structure of language shapes the nature and texture of human engagement, with consequences for human behaviour across levels of society.

So I am offering two specific examples for you to consider what I mean when I say "use color as a value"

This painting, by Henri Matisse from his Fauve period, seems to be wildly colorful, but if you look at it carefully, you notice that he has substituted vibrant, saturated hues for the sorts of neutrals normally used in portraiture. If you look at the values of the image (just how like or dark things are - not their hue) the image makes perfect sense.

Notice how Nickson plays the same game as Matisse, using surprising unexpected colors in place of values in his paintings (this is especially apparent in the Bathers, and Balloon Woman from 2001 is as good an example as any).

The other painter I was introduced to - that's Aubrey Levinthal who lives and works here in Philadelphia. Her paintings have a kind of casual formality that makes me think of Katherine Bradford. I look forward to getting to know her work better...

Toward the close of the film, Gaines says something that rang a bell for me. Painter & teacher John Moore used to say that if you wanted to be a visual artist, you had to make visual art - and I largely agree with him in that there are forms of making that emerge from traditions and maintain a context within them. But the jobs that art (and not just visual art) is called on to perform in contemporary life make the idea that drawing is the sin qua non of being an artmaker seem quaintly out of touch.

I remember years ago when I was teaching at UArts and students would fret about their disciplinary identity it occurred to me that a possible way out was in revisiting your Linnean classification - rather than focusing on your species (ceramicist), you could think about your genus (craftsperson) or your family (maker)...

The first problem deals with VALUE, how light or dark a color is on a scale. Modeling in value is one of the oldest tricks in Painting (add white to a color to make it lighter, add black to make it darker...figuring that out more or less kicked off the Renaissance in Italy in the 14th century). To make things easy, we are going to start in MONOCHROME (the use of one color - in our case, Raw Umber). Since the pigment in Raw Umber (an organic pigment originally made from the clay rich soil of Italy) is pretty bark, we'll take is the darkest value and build a minimum of five lighter values + Titanium White