John Murray classes week of Nov. 29, 2010

All classes:

Try a dead-pan holiday greeting-card painting or ironic decorative object.

Use the medium you're working in a

studied obvious way.

see you next week, john.

John Murray classes Monday Nov. 22

Happy Thanksgiving!
Monday classes only this week.
The NewArt Center is closed all day on wednesday.
Acrylic and Oil Workshop and Post Modern Assemblage:
try developing an image based on the Northeast American Indian. For instance, the Wampanoag people from their postmodern casinos back to Metacom and King Philips War to the tribal culture before European contact...
a tragic and fascinating history full of objects and carvings of great power.
see you Monday...john.

John Murray classes week of Nov. 15, 2010

All classes this week: Matisse again.

i can't get enough of this brillant artist, a constant inspiration to me.

His "French Window at Collioure" from 1915 is a redux of a 1905 painting, "Collioure", which is full of color and redolent with a rich range of floral and nautical Fauvism.

In this work he discards all romance and decorativeness for stark mystery and viewer participation. This work predates the Minimalist paintings of the late 1960's and 1970's by more than half a century.

Try taking a complex decorative recent piece you have done and strip it to its essence. See you next week, john.

John Murray classes week of Nov. 8, 2010

All classes:
Consider the psycholgical evidence
available to you in your work.
Not in content, but in the process of painting, drawing and assembling the work.
Witness this great Matisse picture, Portrait of Olga Merson from 1911:
here Matisse used layering, scraping, scumbling and bold line to reveal his
mental state and feelings about the subject, a woman with whom he had been in difficult relationship.
Try a work yourself, any subject or an abstraction and stay aware of the medium as language and signifier.
See you next week, john.