Figurative Painting

This course is meant to serve as an exploration of the potential to create metaphorical/associative meaning through painting. As part of this course students will paint from a nude human model, allowing all students to gain confidence in rendering the human form, regardless of prior experience. However, painting from a human model is only ONE aspect of this course. This course IS NOT “Figure Painting.” The central focus of the course is to challenge students to think about what they are painting and why, and how they might create paintings that are as rich as possible for viewers to interpret.



This course is specifically titled “Figurative Painting” because there are several ways to interpret how the word ‘figurative’ qualifies the word ‘painting’. In this course we will focus on these two interpretations: either describing paintings with figures (human or otherwise) in them; or describing paintings that carry meaning beyond what we literally see. Of course these two interpretations may overlap as well. (For instance, when paintings that have people depicted in them but are not merely visual records of the people we see.) When this is the case, this course will always focus on the questions raised by human representation—who is being depicted; how are they being depicted, and by whom – and ultimately, how do these factors affect our thinking about the painting and the people depicted; does this painting challenge or reinforce culturally ingrained perceptions of people? To further discussion along these lines, students will do short research projects and presentations on artists whose work deals with these questions.