Artist and Teaching Residency for West Nottingham Academy - Part 2

By Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012) 

My experience at West Nottingham Academy has been one of learning in many regards.  Along side my time working in the studio, I teach two high school courses-an introduction to drawing and studio painting.  To teach is to become firm enough in your artistic practice to share it.  It calls for a re-examination of formal and conceptual principles and applicable history.  Art is such an ancient and expansive field that it is hard to imagine any other mode of thought not relevant to its understanding, i.e. science, literature, music, mathematics, religion, etc.  To say the task of infusing its vast wealth into young minds is daunting is to not dabble in hyperbole. 

         



West Nottingham Academy embeds its pupils in a program that teaches the values of creative art, exposing them early on to the richness of the practice. Students in my introduction to drawing-freshman and sophomores-mostly came in as clean slates, with little to no guided study. My task became setting a precedent of enjoyable learning.  I wanted to make it rigorous yet fun so that the children might become converts to its ways and not end up with future disjointed memories of art fused with disinterest.

The first lesson, and one of my favorites so far, was a practical study in analytic and synthetic cubism.  Cubism is a 20th century art movement, the visual equivalent of a parallel advancement in the sciences-relativity.  Advancements rarely populate single territories, but spread across all of the humanities; there are cubist poets as well as modern authors who used verbalization to express similar revelations of the period, just in different mediums.  To help my pupils grasp an abstract concept, I created a studio exercise.  Each chose a partner and cycled between posing for and drawing one another for ten minute sessions.  After one round the original pose was again taken, but each artist worked from a new viewpoint.  This second perspective was layered upon the previous, thus illustrating multiple vantages of a single object, effectively fragmenting its stability.  This is the nature of analytic cubism.

After several rounds of perspectival layering, the students then collaged words and images on top of their works.  Like the synthetic cubists, the students playfully mixed and matched the medium of text with that of drawing, collaging together various modes of thought and expression.

Each week we work on a new project, and included are pictures of some of the most successful works.  (I have also included a photo of the painting I am making while my students work.)

My painting students have had more experience, being juniors and seniors who have taken several semesters of art.  Most of them, however, have not had much experience with oil painting.  I designed the course to teach the students the principles and craft of oil painting from start to finish, through canvas construction and surface preparation to indirect and direct painting application, all based on various modes of historical practice.  The students work on a single composition throughout the course; so far they have created the surface-gessoed canvas on stretchers, composed the drawing, painted the drawing achromatically, applied generalized dead palate color, and are now working to finalize the image with multiple glazes and layers of full chroma.  I asked that each composition include a subject and environment and elements of the imagination.  This course is far-reaching in that it introduces and explains painting material and its history, the principles of design and composition, tonal structure and drawing,  intensive color-theory, and the use of oil medium directly vs. indirectly.  

Each student is asked to meet painting progression deadlines, contribute during critique of one another’s work, and present analysis on old master compositions of their choosing based on all of the formal, material, and historical information we cover. 

We have a way to go before the class concludes with a student organized show in the school gallery, where we can celebrate everyone’s achievements.  I must say, all the work is definitely paying off; I have included some shots of the paintings in their current states.

I am having a wonderful time not just teaching, but learning daily from my students.  Each subject they choose to represent sets me on an experimental hunt alongside of them to find the clearest, most luminous way to embody it.






##Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012) will be blogging here throughout his artist residency at West Nottingham Academy, Colora, Maryland about his experience.  If you have any questions for Jacob, please leave them in the comments section of the blog. 

All photographs taken by Jacob Hicks.

Artist and Teaching Residency for West Nottingham Academy - Thus Far

By Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012) 

My excitement could not be tempered as my father helped me load up a U-haul rental with my current body of work in the early morning hours of an overcast Brooklyn morning.  I had received my Joseph Campbell-esque call to new adventure in the form of an artist/teacher-in-residence acceptance phone call from West Nottingham Academy a few weeks prior, but now the moment of action was upon me. 

Durga (in progress)

West Nottingham Academy has a special relationship to New York Academy of Art in that our highly respected senior critic Eric Fischl was an alumni of the boarding high school (which just so happens to be the oldest institution of its kind in the nation).  Mr. Fischl decided to construct a bridge between the Academy and WNA to provide an enriched artistic program for the high school and a funded opportunity for selected Academy alumni to gain a trimester’s worth of teaching experience and a sheltered, quiet space for art production.

As my father and I pulled onto and off of busy city-scenic highways (I myself having forgotten the burden of traipsing giant automobiles through urban asphalt labyrinthian webbings; I am strictly publicly transported these days), painting and drawing projects that could finalize the syllabi for my two classes popped in and out, on and off in my mind, like interstate entrance and exit signage or traffic lights. The program to which I was headed was to provide room and board, three wonderfully well-cooked meals a day, a beautiful three-windowed studio space, a solo-exhibition, a generous stipend, and two studio courses to teach five days a week for the duration.  I want to make clear the immense benefits of this for current and future alumni, because the program is available for you to apply to every session, and three alumni total are awarded the residency every year. 

Upon arrival in a lush rural landscape, overgrown with the stunning type of nature I didn’t yet realize I yearned for,  I met Trish Kuhlman, head of WNA’s art department.  Trish, an immensely talented painter and teacher, whose care for and responsibility to her students goes above and beyond the call, introduced me to faculty, staff, and students.  Everyone showed (and continues to show) me such hospitality and welcome that I immediately became convinced I serendipitously turned up in some type of cinematic vision of paradise, where community is close and caring, where nature exhales a majesty that I then breath, where education unites and illuminates. 

My father and I, elated and hopeful, unloaded the truck.  Within the next two days we hung my show, the gallery being a beautifully open space in the main school building, and the proud owner of an authentic Foucault Pendulum, an early mechanical device that legitimized the theory that our Earth was in orbit (I could have believed the theory without the device, seeing as how my world never sits still for too long).  

 

I have now settled in and have moved through several wonderfully fun projects with my classes, all the while contentedly working along on my current composition.  Still, only two weeks have passed!

I fear the difficulty will now be for WNA to pry me loose at the end of my trimester, for I have fallen in love with this intimate, beautiful rural oasis.






##
Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012) will be blogging here throughout his artist residency at West Nottingham Academy, Colora, Maryland about his experience.  If you have any questions for Jacob, please leave them in the comments section of the blog. 

All photographs taken by Jacob Hicks.

One-Sided Story

By Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012)

 Detail of Last Supper-Jacob Hicks

I feared post-graduation and was unsure of my next step-even before the day arrived.  I am sure current second year students can relate (calm down, it will be okay (if only I could have said this to my past, panicked self)).  
 

Coming to the conclusion of my degree was a huge excitement, but I know my task is always progression, so, in my last frenzied months at the Academy,  I began to hunt for a continuation of my art and education.   Thankfully many opportunities are provided by and through our school, and the “One-Sided Story” residency was one such opportunity specifically targeted toward Academy alum. 

Below is a little philosophizing on the theme and goal of the residency, which is to introduce multiple cultures, who carry their “one-sided” versions of life with them (their perspective being entwined within their cultural experience).  It is also to create new connective tissues and entangle varied perspectives in a new, widened truth.

“Oscillate” or “Over Ripe” by Kaitlyn Stubbs

To see multiple perspective is to undulate between truth, like one falling leaf floats through a forest, our subjectivities (eyes, hands, ears, mouths, noses brain-stemmed to thought) become an integral strand in the dynamic human web of consciousness.
 

The truth I know is born of my experience, my location in time, space, and culture.  My “one-sided story” is a fusion of the internal (I like to think eternal) me, and my connection to an ever-diminishing nature, and ever-expanding human architecture.  To be able to weave a more whole subjective understanding of “objectivity” into the greater human structure, my paradigm must confront and adapt to include the “objectivities” of as many other individuals as possible, past and present.

This is the goal of the “One-Sided Story” residency, to provide an environment for international communication among artists whose personal experiences range broadly.

Our side of truth deepens and expands when confronted by another’s.  I am a leaf floating with a palpable peripheral forest-distant, but for this moment, accessible.

For information about Jacob Hicks and Kaitlyn Stubbs' residency check out their kickstarter campaign.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2054989324/send-us-to-germany

Our Giverny Hamlet

August 13-26, eight Academy students lived and worked at the Terra Foundation for American Art-Europe in Giverny, France as part of a two-week Artist in Residence Program.  Daniel Bilodeau (MFA 2013), Adam Carnes (MFA 2013), Ivy Hickam (MFA 2013), Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012), Gaetanne Lavoie (MFA 2013), Robert Plater (MFA 2013), Amanda Scuglia (MFA 2013) and Valentina Stanislavskaia (MFA 2013) will continue to share their experiences here.

By Ivy Hickam (MFA 2013)

Tuesday, August 14:
Today I rode up a hill with a borrowed mountain bike to the edge of a farm field.  I could see little houses and valleys below.  On my way I met two horses, one black, one white. Irritated by flies in their eyes they kept nodding their heads at me.  I patted their warm brows.  A young French girl, who must have stepped out of a painting, walked over to me calling out the horses' names.  She was rosy cheeked and wore a dress the color of the sky.  I spoke to her in my broken French and she  patiently waited to understand.  When I said "Je suis Américain," she smiled.  She lives in a house down the way.  I wished I could paint her.  I said "À tout à l'heure" and hopped back on my bike.
An attempt at a landscape was made farther on up the hill.  A sweaty brow and spilt water decided when it  was done. I had fussed with it too much and the lights were muddied.  But with renewed excitement for watercolor and landscape, I decided I would try again the next day for I'm out of practice in plein air and I knew that's how the day's painting would go.

 

  

After first week's crit, leaving Le Hameau

The studio area the Terra Foundation gave us for the two weeks is called "Le Hameau." The studios are said to have a lot of soul.  They are rich in history; Lilla Cabot Perry, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Mary Wheeler, and Richard Miller all painted here.

"Lady in a garden," Frederick Carl Frieseke

The interior of my studio is always cool inside because of its thick walls.  It has an old fireplace and touches of paint from previous residents. I've contributed gesso marks to the floor and a large branch from a berry bush cut and left by the gardener.  The gardens hiding to the right of the building are a little wild; not too perfectly kept and lovingly overgrown. 

Blog post originally posted in Ivy's Blog (post: "Giverny" and "The Hamlet")

Impression, Soleil Levant

August 13-26, eight Academy students lived and worked at the Terra Foundation for American Art-Europe in Giverny, France as part of a two-week Artist in Residence Program.  Daniel Bilodeau (MFA 2013), Adam Carnes (MFA 2013), Ivy Hickam (MFA 2013), Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012), Gaetanne Lavoie (MFA 2013), Robert Plater (MFA 2013), Amanda Scuglia (MFA 2013) and Valentina Stanislavskaia (MFA 2013) will continue to share their experiences here.

By Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012)

Over the course of two weeks I was lucky enough to join a group of gifted artists led by Professor Jean-Pierre Roy, Daniel Bilodeau (MFA 2013), Adam Carnes (MFA 2013), Ivy Hickam (MFA 2013), Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012), Gaetanne Lavoie (MFA 2013), Robert Plater (MFA 2013), Amanda Scuglia (MFA 2013) and Valentina Stanislavskaia (MFA 2013), on a residency in Giverny, France, the residence of revolutionary seer, Claude Monet.  

Monet was wholly indebted to phenomenological truth, more than he was indebted to pre-conceived standards of art affixed to institutionalization.  He was never to give himself over to the ways in which he was taught to see-though he was clearly taught, from an early age, the precedence of French academic art.  History is opened when placed in the hands of someone willing first to learn, and then to seek change.   

Initially to him, I assume, it must have seemed ludicrous to speak the visual language of established artistic tradition and call it mimetic truth-- as it seems ludicrous for any member of contemporary life to refer to a Cimabue painting as the realistic mirror of the human eye to the exterior world. 

Traditions are born.  They swell, grow roots, share excitements, age, and then must be upended, just as the dilapidated building, whose structure was once perfect, must be demolished and rebuilt.  To upend institutional thought is to teach us our thoughts want and will always focus on progression.  We are taught ideas as if they are unchangeable, but to triumph is to change.

So Monet goes outside, to a garden, and decides to paint the arc of time by way of color and movement.  He dabs in the changing light against a white linen the optical equivalencies of water, weeping willow, chapel, haystack, human--knowing those containing lines of structure are the lies of his mind wanting to create demarcations and separations.  What he comprehends is the melt of visual unity.

He calls a work Impressionist Sunrise, and his critics poke fun and name his friends and followers “Impressionists.”   The sonorous bell of the word rings, and the way western society sees again moves.  A new cathedral of thought slowly builds awaiting its fall.

It is necessary to love the modes of thought that shape us, that come before, and to thank them.  It is our duty to shape new modes of thought.