Painting and Photography in France

Paris

SESSION I : June 29 – July 10, 2011; SESSION II : July 10 – 21, 2011

In Paris, PAINTING AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN FRANCE participants visit museums like the LOUVRE, the CLUNY,
and the GARE D’ORSAY, as well as historical sites and monuments, like NOTRE DAME and the EIFFEL TOWER.

Equally important, we get to know the city itself, exploring its gardens and fountains, taking boat tours
on the Seine and enjoying Paris’s many restaurants and cafés.

SKETCHBOOKS have been important tools for artists throughout the ages, including PICASSO,
who wrote on the cover of one of his journals, Je suis le cahier (“I am the sketchbook”).

Picasso journal.

As it did for Picasso and other creative individuals, the sketchbook in this course serves many purposes:
it is documents interesting events and experiences, and records thoughts, feelings,
memories, fantasies, dreams, both in pictures and in words. The following pages
from 2006 & 2008 participant KIM HAM show how the sketchbook can be used to document the trip.

Photographs and other images can also be kept in sketchbooks as souvenirs, as well as references for
future work, as in this sketchbook page from 2008 participant LEONOR NEISLER.

During our MUSEUM VISITS, we use sketchbooks for learning about great works of art, especially to
understand their compositions. The sketchbook page below is by MARIANNE HOYLEN, 2006, from
presentations at the Louvre.

Lastly, PAINTING AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN FRANCE participants use the sketchbook to
develop their own paintings, following a traditional method used by Renaissance masters
like RAPHAEL to contemporary artists like ANDREW WYETH. The process begins with quick
gestural sketches of possible pictorial arrangements, along with studies of intriguing details.
More developed drawings follow, to which values of dark, medium and light are added.
Value sketches are then translated into color sketches, which become the basis for a final painting.
Far from slowing down the creative process, the practice of preliminary sketches
and studies actually speeds things up, allowing the artist quickly to try out lots of possibilities
and to make decisions about composition, color, etc., before committing them to the finished work.

The first two steps of the process are illustrated by KIM HAM :

Color sketches may be quick studies or more carefully rendered paintings, but always at a small scale,
with particular attention to composition.

For more pictures of Paris, visit the GALLERY page and click on “Paris.”