CLARTSA035 - Maximalist Painting: Composition and Creation
Bring abundance to your paintings, creating layers of colors, shapes, patterns and textures. Effective maximalist art requires skill and restraint, harnessing balance between excess and editing. Hone your abilities through a series of compositional studies. Learn to extract the essence of your artwork whether you are inspired by images, sounds, stories or other sources. The techniques shared in this course are “kaleidoscopic,” designed to animate your work with a sense of movement and time. Practice zooming in and out; repeating forms; introducing larger and smaller elements; incorporating complex stencils, collage and freehand marks; simplifying and obscuring shapes and patterns; reusing and recycling colors; and walking the fine edge between confusion and profusion. Each student will create two large paintings in acrylic or oil. This course is designed for students who have taken an introductory painting class or have basic familiarity with color theory, paint mixing and application.
You may also be interested in Laura Spector's other course, Small Works: From Drawing to Painting, March 25–May 6, 2024 (no class April 22), from 6:30 to 9 p.m.
Course Details
Laura Spector is a Houston-based artist and art instructor. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at The Jung Center in Houston. She is best known for her acclaimed Museum Anatomy project, which began in 1996, where she collaborated with museum curators in 16 countries, searching for hidden, stolen, lost and destroyed paintings, which she reimagined in paint, photography and sculpture. Among Spector’s honors are a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, an individual grant from Houston Arts Alliance, the Sovereign Asian Art Prize and an artist-in-residence at Atelierhaus Hilmsen, Germany. Ms. Spector was recently an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Online--Synchronous
This course will be delivered in a synchronous format online. Participants will receive login instructions to the course page which will provide access to the virtual classroom link and other resources. All online classes are held at Central Standard Time.
Supply lists for studio art are shared two weeks before the course start date. Contact cpcoord@rice.edu with questions. Fee does not include cost of supplies, approximately $150. This course is designed for students who have taken an introductory painting class or have basic familiarity with color theory, paint mixing and application.