Po Chu-ï / Setting a Migrant Goose Free

Setting a Migrant Goose Free

Po Chu-ï   (772-846)

Snows heavy in Hsun-yang this tenth-year winter,
riverwater spawns ice, tree branches break and fall,

and hungry birds flock east and west by the hundred,
a migrant goose crying starvation loudest among them.

Pecking through snow for grass, sleeping nights on ice,
its cold wings lumber slower and slower up into flight,

and soon it’s tangled in a river-boy’s net, carried away
snug in his arms, and put for sale alive in the market.

Once a man of the north, I’m accused and exiled here.
Man and bird: though different, we’re both visitors,

and it hurts a visiting man to see a visiting bird’s pain,
so I pay the ransom and set you free. Goose, o soaring

goose rising into the clouds — where will you fly now?
Don’t fly northwest; that’s the last place you should go.

There in Huai-hsi, rebels still loose, there’s no peace,
just a million armored soldiers long massed for battle:

imperial and rebel armies grown old facing each other.
Starved and exhausted — they’d love to get hold of you,

those tough soldiers. They’d shoot you and have a feast,
then pluck your wings clean to feather their arrows.


_____

The Selected Poems of Po Chu-ï, translated by David Hinton, New Directions, 1999.

Week 13: OPEN (guide)

Marsden Hartley

This World Awakes to Silence

                                from the Hebrew


This world awakes to silence
under night's blanket.

From far away I return to myself,
In the dark I look deeply within:
like the night, I, too, am wide,
and like it flow slowly
to infinity.

The pure silence
that lies beneath all life
seeps into me.

I'll rest in this silence,
apart from the labor of my days,
and a blue child will sleep in me,
and a goat with a necklace of stars.

                                               David Vogel

(translated by Peter Everwine)
_____



Note on choice of this poem: In these times, which demand action, how do we find the core from which to act with strength and conviction? Let's talk about this...

In addition... Worth reading...

Here's how poet and musician friend Clara Hsu put it this week:

"I want to say something intelligent about the outcome of our election but cannot. Only that now, more than ever, we have a moral responsibility to ensure the viability of art, music and poetry. They are the true grains that make us grow as human beings. My eyes are set upon them and nothing else."
_______

Ken Knabb
OUT IN THE OPEN / Remarks on the Trump Election
http://www.bopsecrets.org/recent/trump.htm

A Cornel West piece:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/17/american-neoliberalism-cornel-west-2016-election 

Richard Rorty in 1998:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/19/donald-trump-us-election-prediction-richard-rorty

Daniel Duane in NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/i-wish-we-all-could-be-californian.html

José Antonio Vargas, 19 November 2016, NYTimes:
Undocumented in Trump’s America - The New York Times 

Charles Simic article from 2004 (NYRB):
One of the first pieces I recall reading about whole groups of people supporting social policies and voting against what would seem to be their own best interests:  
Down There on a Visit | by Charles Simic | The New York Review of Books

Charles Simic, NYRB 2016: 
Expendable America | by Charles Simic | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian, 6 Dec 2016:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/06/standing-rock-protest-success-demonstrations

Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian. 8 December 2016:
A bit long, but links together many important points
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/dec/08/welcome-age-anger-brexit-trump 

Richard Rodriguez, Reuters column, August 2015: 
Ladies and gentlemen, let's get ready to Trump-le! | Reuters 

Zadie Smith, "On Optimism and Despair," from the 12/22/2016 NYRB:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/on-optimism-and-despair/

Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian's facebook post  on what we can learn for today from the authoritarian regimes of the 20th Century:
https://www.facebook.com/timothy.david.snyder/posts/1206636702716110



 

Week 12: BRIDGE (trust)

Milton Avery

Fair Trade
Gary Soto

I did my best when I was young
just married, walking my love
From one room to the next.
I was living in my madness--
The traffic inside
My head while outside
Our downtown apartment, vatos
Cruised with blue tatoos...
I walked my wife from
One sun-lit room to the next,
And on a dead Sunday
I walked her to the Azteca Cafe,
Slum eating, rags
of chicken wings, lumpy gravy,
The anemic coins
Of carrots. My money,
Then, was dollar bills
That tumbled through the wash
And coins warmed by sunlight
On the chest of drawers.
Money is what gave me
A plate of chicken,
Steam like a glove,
And when I wiped
My glasses, a Mexican man
was asking for toast.
The waitress turned
And started the order,
Two slices browning
in their stand-up bed
Of red, angry filaments.
When she said, Dollar thirty,"
I thought, two slices
No meat or butter. The man
Hesitated, then fumbled for
Coins from his pocket.
This, I saw, was pride.
I stabbed my carrots,
Hurting for this man.
He took his toast
In a napkin,
Toast that was already cool.
He left no trail of crumbs
But the line of memory
From my eye to the bell jingling
On the closing door.

_____

From Gary Soto, New and Selected Poems, 1995.

I typed this up late last night, seems a model of just where we are... I was grateful to be with all of you last night--who would have predicted--and who would have guessed how well we found ways to be together.  Thank you each one... Tony

The line of memory...

(Rebecca sent the photo; see more on her notebook site: http://rebeccagracecoleman.blogspot.com/)

September 1, 1939 / W.H. Auden

Odilon Redon, Red Flower Clouds, pastel, 1903

September 1, 1939
W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

_______

Auden wrote this poem at the very outset of WWII, as an Englishman in New York. It's filled with many conflicted thoughts and feelings, reflecting the crises of his own time as he saw them. Auden later rejected parts of the poem.

It was first published in the New Republic, and then in Auden's 1940 collection Another Time. He later decided to edit what he had written--an important story in it's own right. In part because he questioned the line, "We must love one another or die."

In the end, the poem is often quoted in its original version--and despite Auden's doubts, the line stands. As E.M. Forester put it, "Because he once wrote 'We must love one another or die' he can command me to follow him."

I'm including it here because it came up last night, and I was surprised that none of you were familiar with it. What that line means for each of us at our own moment in time--that's the question.

The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky wrote a long essay on the poem published in his book of essays, Less than One  (New York, 1986), pps. 305-41. It's dense, but intensely meaningful!
____

I added the Redon because it's also become part of our lives...

Week 11: LOVE (change)

Morris Graves

The Wild Swans at Coole

William Butler Yeats

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake's edge or pool

Delight men's eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?



_____


In parallel:  Wild Geese Descending on a Sandbank,  performed on the guqin by Gong Yi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN_RvPWe9vc

Week 10: Supplement for NEAR

After last night, I realized that I wanted to post this for all of you--the question being, what we see in the faces here. The photograph is from a televised performance by Russian bard singer, Victor Berkovsky, in the year 1990. I asked you about their expressions. Alex suggested the word rapture. I thought that was a good start. They're listening to Berkovsky's version of a poem--presented here as a song--M. Svetlov's Grenada, from 1925, which was soon after the years of the Revolution and Civil War. What we're watching, of course, is from many years later--but the memory of the those events--and all the events in between--how they're felt and understood--how they're conveye--is what's important. Indelible, at least to me. I wanted to see if any of this carried over to each of you...

Here's the link:  Виктор Берковский Гренада - YouTube

Week 10: NEAR

Odilon Redon

My Papa's Waltz
Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
_____

Roethke reading the poem:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/my-papas-waltz-audio-only

Week 9: FIELD

Wang Meng, 1308-85, Scholar in a Pavilion under Trees, Cleveland Museum

Umberto Saba, The Goat

I talked to a goat.
She was alone in a pasture, and tethered.
Stuffed with grass, soaked
by the rain, she bleated.

That monotonous bleating was brother
to my sorrow. And I answered, first
in jest, then because sorrow is eternal,
has one voice and never changes.
I heard this voice in the wails
of a solitary goat.

In a goat with a Semitic face,
I heard all other pain lamenting,
all other lives.


(translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan)
____

The reading I had in mind to accompany this is John Berger's essay, "Field," in his book About Looking. I'm wondering if you can hunt it up as a pdf online... I found one, but with distracting annotations. My own copy of the book--now where is it?
_____

And in a different tone,  another poem from Peter Everwine:

Back from the Field

Peter Everwine

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields,

looking for God knows what.

Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing.

Something to fill an empty spot.

Maybe a luminous angel

or a country girl with a secret dark.

He came back empty-handed,

or so I thought.

Now I find them:

thistles, goatheads,

the barbed weeds

all those with hooks or horns

the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones

those wearing lantern jaws,

old ones in beards, leapers

in silk leggings, the multiple

pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those

with juices and saps

like the fingers of thieves

nation after nation of grasses

that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds

and grab handholds

in whatever lean place.

It’s been a good day.

Week 8: ROUND

Albert York, oil on canvas, mounted on masonite, 28 x27cm., 1963

How It Is


This is how it is --

      One turns away
      and walks out into the evening.
      There is a white horse on the prairie, or a river
      that slips away among dark rocks.

     One speaks, or is about to speak,
     not that it matters.

     What matters is this --

It is evening.
I have been away a long time.
Something is singing in the grass.


                                              -- Peter Everwine

Week 6: REACH

Alfred Wallis, oil on cardboard, date unknown

O western wind, when wilt thou blow
  That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
  And I in my bed again!  

              --anonymous, 16th century   

Week 5: TREASURE

Ionian

C.P. Cavafy 

Though we have broken their statues,
though we have driven them out of their temples,
the gods did not die because of this at all.
O Ionian land, it is you they still love,
it is you their souls still remember.
When the August morning dawns upon you
a vigor from their life moves through your air;
and at times a figure of ethereal youth,
indistinct, in rapid stride,
crosses over your hills.

                                              

                                                                      Rae Dalven translation

Week 4: MEND

Sea Concert, Tadeusz Kantor, 1967 (photo by Eustachy Kossakowski)

I don't know if there's a single image that can work in parallel with the word MEND--or if all the conflicting qualities in the image above get at some of it--but since we started looking at images from Poland in the late 1960s, this seemed a good locator. The performer here (is that the word?) is Edward Krasinski (we'll look at more). The idea for the piece came from Tadeusz Kantor. And the photographer was Eustachy Kossakowsi. (His picturing of the scene is crucial for how we understand--and thereby remember it. Or remember and thereby understand it?)

A mysteriously simple time--yet with personal trials of an immense sort, personal and public both--the politics of those years were an over-the-top challenge--to be discussed. But at the same time, there was a certain clarity as to artistic purpose--and a necessity to the questions asked...

We'll continue with this...

Week 3: GATHER

I was going to include a Morandi here--because of the way we focused on his painting in class on Tuesday evening. But I wanted you to have something new--or rather, something new/old--the Ryder above. It's thought to be from 1870-75--Ryder would have been in his mid-twenties. At the outset of his career--not one of the later paintings, with their mysterious shapes--shapes he discovered (found) in the course of working and reworking an image until something--well, something miraculous appeared. The late paintings are the ones he's remembered for. But it's always good to see where an artists begins. Look at the shifts in the whites here--the shapes that carry the narrative (is a cow in an ambiguous pasture a narrative? Are four bottles in the middle of a gray field a narrative?). Better, how does the paint itself tell its story...

If you look at the Barbizon painters from France, you'll see the source of Ryder's tonalism here. (And tone was always an crucial quality.) But the subtle way he uses warm and cool color is also distinctive. Maybe more the possibility of color... In this regard, we could compare him with George Inness--another wonderful American painter...

Gather--a set of meanings...

Notes

struggle with:

primitive
painterly
dumb like a painter  (duchamp and ideas rather than materiality)
guston: art takes care of herself
economy of images
color
adrian stokes-   carving and modelling
richard wollheim - seeing in
psychoanalysis

ryder
corot
bonnard/vuillard
guston
sylvia fell
auerback camden road school, even sickert (look at sickert)
resnick
early twombly - twombly sculpture
george inness
morandi
new york (after cezanne)

images that had to be...

Adrian Stokes- colour
Sylvia Fell - Northumberland (Cambria)

Week 2: MEANDER

Adrian Stokes, Still Life (Last Eleven: No. 7), 1972

Adrian Stokes was an English painter and critic. It's interesting here to see something so clearly specific in subject and at the same time, so fluid in how he arrives at the painting itself. Caught my eye in somebody's snapshot from the Tate when I was looking into Stokes' work. The image above is truer in color--it's from the Tate Gallery website. One of Stokes' ideas had to do with the distinction between carving and modelling. His phrase, "carved to flower..." Letting what's already present in the stone emerge in the making...


The Waking
Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   

God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

Week 1: TOUCH

Tortoise-shell oracle bone, ancient China

Here are some words for the theme in French and German--the images that come up using them search terms are quite different. Let's discuss. Also, a search in Chinese would be fascinating.

Landschaft des Berührens
paysage de contact
landscape of touch
to touch:  toucher
to touch: berührens
rühren= stir 

Touch--physical, psychological, emotional. How this plays out in painting, for example--the painterly tradition--where the brush stroke itself is evidence of touch. A trace. Or sculpture--the mark of the hand... Or in drawing--the touch of the medium on paper...

The image above, an oracle bone from the 3rd millenium BC (Shang Dynasty) comes by this quality naturally. In part because of the materials (which are organic), and in part because of the effects of time. (What Walter Benjamin referred to as aura.) And because of the very way it's represented. These are the themes I touched on (!) in the class last night--and which we'll develop together over the semester--and beyond.

The physicality of image always central (not simply representation).

 

Students' Online Notebooks F2016

Jeremy Breningstal           https://visual170.wordpress.com


Elizabeth Ryan                  excavatingexcess.blogspot.com


Rebecca Coleman              rebeccagracecoleman.blogspot.com


Rafael Tiffnay                    cargocollective.com/whatisntnature


Alexander Craghead         berkeleycitylimits.blogspot.com


Esther McKenzie                esthervis280.blogspot.com 
      

Jingpeng Li                        artworkofli.blogspot.com


Jake Ongaro                      jakeongarovs280.blogspot.com


Lucy Stephenson               http://ldstephenson.weebly.com


Robin Chandler                  https://robinlchandler.wordpress.com    



Notes on Class

letter from noor

Wrote to Liz, when she was applying for the class: Myself--a painter. But not with too much ideological baggage. Making something beautiful and meaningful (also two hopes) are pretty much where I'm at, the one being a route to the other. This can have application in any of these things creative people do... That's what 280 is about as well...

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"
               --keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn 

How is this true for us? Or is it true for us?
_______

First night:

cat watching hitchcock   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cVM5infYxk
oaxaca skull (story)

china
history--can we reconstruct
oracle bones
bi disks
virgin sightings
rock hound and geode
america

Send email BLOCK. IN CLASS. Students send me confirmation
New people: send me application with work (on description)

Units & registration (enrolling): I bring course numbers (cec's) NEXT WEEK
sign up for 1-3 units as best for each student. they do this when they enroll with cec (discuss)

Class specifics:
Attendance (whole class)--all classes
Project each week
Students notebooks online (blog sites) - CREATE ONE THIS WEEK
Send me URL as active link. I make list and post.
Images of your work plus simple (meaningful) text
AND a new course description? How do I best reach people?

maybe Kenneth Rexroth essays?
san francisco in the 60s  (ken knabb's posts)
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/sfe/
with james schuyler? selections from hus diaries, his art writing
gary snyder?
poems

I tailor my intro talks to class - show work to fit group as well

For next week: See my post "Week I: TOUCH"

Bibliography Notes

Some writings on art. I put this together in an hour last week--books and writers that have influenced me over the years. Not that they have to be your books--but a good indication of why Dubovsky says some of the things he does... I may keep adding to this--and of course, some will come up for discussion in class. This dates me, no doubt--but you should understand how and why...
_____

James Schuyler, his reviews in Art News, 1950s  (Thomas Hess, editor).
Published more recently in book form, from Black Sparrow.
Read for the way Schuyler's sensibility guides his writing--the ideas follow from seeing and feeling. His diaries have this quality as well. A revelation.

Frank O'Hara  (The Day Lady Died). O'Hara worked in the curatorial department at the MOMA in New York in the 1950s. One of the younger poets who also knew the younger artists of that time. O'Hara's poems, John Ashbury's poems, James Schuyler's poems. Paintings of Larry Rivers (in the end, uneven), Fairfield Porter, and Jane Freilicher.

Jane Freilicher, Dark Afternoon, oil on canvas, 2001

Fairfield Porter. Edition of his writings edited by painter Rackstraw Downes. An extremely clear-minded writer as well as a painter. In the 1950s Porter was better known for his writing than as a painter.

And the modernist bible:  Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture.
Read his chapter, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Hard to believe today, but there were decades in which Greenberg's views ruled supreme. If your work didn't conform, you were outside. Hence (much later) the term, "outsider artist"? And counter-movements like Fluxus--artists who knew--or at least sensed--that modernism was only one point of view...

Susan Sontag's essay, "Notes on Camp," followed from this. 1964. Also a revelation when we first read it. (I was 19.)

John Berger, About Looking along with his other collections. 1970s and on. Berger's views always interesting. He started as a painter, wrote essays for many years, and then turned to film...

Earlier, mid-20th century: Roger Fry on Cezanne. Adrian Stokes.

Richard Wolheim's The Art in Painting.
Notion of "seeing in." This book was Wolheim's answer to the theories of Richard Arnheim and Ernst Gombrich.

The Warburg Insitute, London.
It's history, intellectual roots, and view of art history. Aby Warburg (1866–1929), Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Gombrich, Gertrude Bing, Edgar Wind, Erwin Panofsky, Rudolph Wittkower... Charles Hope on Venetian painting...

And Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1952. A Warburg classic, of continuing interest...

Walter Benjamin.
Hannah Arendt edited a collection of his earlier essays, under the title of Illuminations. Her introduction important. Unpacking My Library, The Storyteller, many others...

Paintings of R.B. Kitaj, and his writings that accompanied them, especially in the 1960s and 70s.
Kitaj's sensibility, his way of working, and his attitude... what he was able to reach...

R.B. Kitaj, The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, 1960

George Kubler, The Shape of Time.
Kubler's ideas about form classes--and his rejection of Panofsky et al. What can we say when we know nothing about the scoial context in which a work of art is located? Kubler's field was Pre-Columbian art--whereby he wrestled with this question.  His "contrarian" observations will almost always make you re-think what you know...

Eric Auerbach,  Mimesis. 
A collection of essays on the history of consciousness as understood through particular moments in literature, beginning with Homer ("Odysseus' Scar") and running to Virginia Wolfe... 
 
Paintings of Philip Guston, and his sporadic oracular notes. Especially from late 1960s and on. Guston died in 1980. His later paintings influenced a generation. "The hand needs to be a little ahead of the idea..." (my paraphrase)

Philip Guston, lithograph, print dated 1980

Today? Maybe Jed Perl. Maybe the English painter, Julian Bell. Maybe Michael Kimmelman...

Everybody's trying to sort it all out, the work produced today, in relation to the wave of absolutely everything else...

Course Description F2016

Visual Studies 280 Graduate Seminar: Beginnings

Fall 2016 / 1-3 units  (CCN 12368)

Tuesday Evenings / 6-9:30pm / Room 170 Wurster

Anthony Dubovsky

This is a class about imagination and ideas. A road trip, perhaps—or a voyage. We begin each week with a theme—often a single word---as point of departure. Each person in the group does a project in response—a drawing, a painting, a collage—the medium is open. In the following class we look at the work, and a conversation ensues. And then, a new word.

Note that the hand is important throughout--how the sense of touch becomes a guide.

Following this format, the class develops a certain rhythm--a kind of opening. Not just in terms of skill (although skill can play a part), but more in finding the right visual language to give form to one’s feelings about and understanding of the surrounding world. A challenge that carries over into any of the design fields—and beyond….  

Important: Since discussion is central to each class, students need to be fully confident in spoken English—both comprehension and conversation.

Required: One project each week, made with energy and commitment... Attendance at all class meetings, and a well-crafted book with reproductions of your work, including a short essay about your journey, due at the end of the term. Open to grad students and some seniors from all departments, but limited in enrollment to 12 students.  This can be a good place to explore your initial thesis ideas.

If you're interested, send Anthony Dubovsky an e-mail with a paragraph or two about yourself and your backgound in the arts, along with 2-3 jpegs of your work. Make sure your name is on each jpeg. Send before August 20 to the following email address: chambersstreet[at]hotmail.com. Earlier applications will receive priority.

Painting: Anthony Dubovsky, Gulf Shore, acrylic on cardboard, 2014