Sunday July 19

Michael Strauss,  Oil and Watercolors

“Full Circle” traditional tunes with voice, harp, hammered dulcimer, guitar & recorders

Tuesday evenings, 4-8 p.m., B-203 Angell on the UVM Campus.  Enrollment has begun.  There are still spaces.  Look under the Courses/Workshops Tab of the website for more details.  Class will begin at the end of August.  For more information call:

Professor Michael Strauss

531  Cook Physcial Sciences

Ph: 865 2329 (home)

Ph: 656 2594 (secretary in Chemistry) 

email: Michael.Strauss@uvm.edu

web:  http://www.mjstrauss.com

  “There is something that’s very intense about the experience of sitting down and having to look at something in the way that you do in order to make a drawing or a painting of it.  By the time you’ve done that, you feel that you’ve really understood what you were looking at…. and somehow it becomes a method of possessing the experience in a unique way.“  Robert Bechtle.

Drawing is visual reasoning–it involves decisions about mark making, evaluating and reevaluating these marks, and ultimately, taking action to create in a particular way. The images made on paper during drawing form a partial record of  thinking.  Preliminary sketches – early ideas – are easily done with a pencil on paper.  In this way, they are easily revised and redone. This is one of the quickest and most direct means of creating visual representations of ideas. Free hand drawing and redrawing allow multiple interpretations and reinterpretations, and thus a constant production of alternatives. The process may be exploratory, expressive, or inspir-ational. It can scrutinize, map, record, exemplify, explain, symbolize or objectify.  It is a way of discovering and ultimately, a powerful and important way of knowing.   

Drawing is a discipline in its own right, but it is also foundational for all the visual arts and sciences.  It is seen by some as the art form closest to pure thought.  At its best it is very precise in its meaning, and yet it is infinitely discursive.  It is one of the most ancient human traditions, but is in a state of continual renewal in both technique and content, from ancient cave drawings of animals to CHEM3D Pro images of molecular structures .

In this course you will be creating images in the process of learning how to draw, and you will be writing about this process and recording in language what you have experienced.   You will learn to draw better, and come to understand drawing as a way of knowing about a subject.  

Spent Friday evening up at Toby and Laura’s with Toby, Bill and Tony.  Had a great meal, a little to drink, good talk, demos on making wooden bowls, and in the A.M. a great breakfast.