Sneak Peek at Spring Course Content
Five instructors offer a glimpse into their upcoming Spring Courses. Learn more about Contemporary Plein Air Painting, Cartoon Portraits, Art in the Wilderness, Creating Miniature Spaces, and Drop In Handbuilding: Ceramics and Sculpture Working Session.
Contemporary Plein Air Painting
Instructor: Lauren Szabo
Saturdays, March 6 - March 27
(4 sessions) | 10:00am-4:00pm PST.
On site at Bay Area outdoor locations.
Image: Lauren Szabo
Image Description: An easel with a painting of a container crane against the landscape, with a palette full of paint and brushes, stands before a row of container cranes.
Join Lauren Szabo for four full days of painting out in the field! Locations are scouted out ahead of time by the instructor, and are democratically discussed ahead of time in the Bay Area. Lauren will suggest some locations and take any suggestions from enrolled students to be considered by the group.
A typical day begins with a brief meet up (outdoors, distanced and masked) before students orient themselves, and scout out an official painting spot and find their compositions. Materials and painting equipment are set up, and painting starts typically within the first hour of class.
The instructor will do a demonstration and complete a painting that day in a timely manner, between checking in with students individually. Students will work for a couple of hours, and take a break for lunch when everyone feels ready either individually and/or collectively.
After lunch, students will finish their paintings, within an hour left of class. Class will meet briefly for a mini critique and students will share what they've learned and made. After sharing final thoughts, the class will clean up for the day!
Learn more about Contemporary Plein Air Painting!
About Lauren:
Lauren Jade Szabo is a Los Angeles born artist who lives and works in Oakland, CA. She graduated with a BFA in Illustration from California College of the Arts with distinction, and received an MFA Fellowship from San Francisco Art Institute for graduate study in Painting, completed in 2018. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in private collections in Europe and the United States. Szabo has shown with the DeYoung Museum and the MarinMOCAt. She currently exhibits with SFMOMA Artist's Gallery and also loves to teach painting, drawing, and professional practice.
Upcoming show: SFAI 150 | A Spirit of Disruption. On view: March 19, 2021—July 3, 2021, Walter and McBean Galleries and Diego Rivera Gallery, SFAI—Chestnut Campus
Cartoon Portraits
Instructor: Emily McPeek
Wednesdays, March 18 - April 22
6 sessions, 5:30-8:30pm PST. Online
Image: Emily McPeek.
Image Description: a caricaturized drawing of a large headed man resembling Donald Trump dangles a mask by his fingers. A speech bubble says “Imagine this face, wearing a mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kinds, queens - I just don’t see it.”
This class is for anyone who has ever wanted to draw themselves as a cartoon, or walked by a caricature artist and thought to themselves, “Can I do that”? This class is a great opportunity for folks like that! This course will cover the basic understanding of portraiture. Students will start by covering fundamental facial anatomical features, proportions, and will learn to distort the visage by maintaining and exaggerating key features. This class will be presented as a hybrid between realism and cartooning. This class will make it easy for students to not only caricaturize their own likeness, but that of their friends and family! Students will be able to impress their social circle with new-found drawing skills, and the capability of capturing the most identifiable features of friends and family.
Learn more about Cartoon Portraits here!
About Emily:
Emily has been telling stories her whole life. Since she was a child she has been drawing comic strips, books, and other forms of visual dialogue because she believes that an image can hold a greater story than words on a page. She is a recent MFA graduate from the San Francisco Art Institute, working primarily in oil paint. At the Institute Emily worked as a T.A. in painting/ drawing classes for about a year. She received her BFA at USC, and had the honor of working as an artist assistant for Kristin Calabrese, who also went to SFAI as an undergrad. She helped expedite various paintings for a pending show, including her painting Art as Bandaid. At USC Emily also won first place for the Arts in Action: Momentum award sponsored by Volkswagen. The winning piece, Women Praying, was displayed in the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. The Kennedy Center later requested two more paintings to show in the State Russian Museum. During Emily’s schooling in San Francisco and Los Angeles, she created a body of work that stems from her childhood interests in storytelling. Through illustration and caricatures Emily recreates her surroundings in a comical way, focusing on the people in those stories. These paintings are larger than life absurd narratives of local existence, with hyperbolic tendencies that are more revealing than fantastical. They confront the audience through size, density, and strangeness, and acknowledge the nature of our internal dialogues in relation to local existence. Emily continues to paint and exhibit work in the Bay area, most recently in San Francisco and Los Gatos. See more of Emily’s work here!
Art in the Wilderness
Instructor: Liesa Lietzke
Three sessions available; see below!
Online and on site
Image: Liesa Lietzke.
Image Description: A delicately drawn black and white charcoal drawing of a scene with boulders and trees in the foreground, and mountains in the background.
Liesa Lietzke will be teaching a suite of three classes in March, April and May, designed to build student’s drawing and painting skills and experience in the outdoors. The three will dovetail well for beginning and intermediate students, and can also be enjoyed individually for those who want to brush up on a particular skill, or head right out into our green destinations.
Session 1: Drawing and Painting: Skills Practice
March 18 - April 8 (Thursdays; 4 sessions). 6:00pm-7:30pm PST. Online.
Participants will be joining Liesa via Zoom as she demonstrates from her studio. Students will focus on drawing from their own photographs of their favorite wild sites. Some drawing experience would be helpful, upon which students will build specific skills for capturing nature. Liesa will be showing students how to use value and texture to bring wilderness photos to life.
Learn more about Drawing Wilderness: Basic Skills for Drawing on the Trail!
Session 2: Watercolor In The Wild
March 18 - April 8 (Thursdays; 4 sessions). 7:30pm-9:00pm PST. Online.
Drawing and Painting: Skills Practice students will continue learning with us the same night, until 9:00pm. Or, those just wanting to learn/practice watercolor will join the class at 7:30 with pencil drawings, or with photos they would like to paint from directly, in a wilderness theme. Liesa will be reviewing basic watercolor techniques and demonstrating how color and value can bring a greater depth to natural scenes.
Learn more about Watercolor In The Wild - Color your Wilderness Drawings!
Session 3: Taking it into Nature: Art Field Trips
April 17 - May 8 (Saturdays; 4 sessions). 11:00am - 4:00pm PST. On site at Bay Area outdoor locations.
Once the skills classes are complete, students are invited to take their skills outside! This class will head to park settings in San Francisco and the East Bay. Folks who have the art skills described above already are welcome to just join us for the field trip class! (Note: Participants will be asked to wear masks and observe safe distances, whether or not they are vaccinated for COVID-19 (though vaccination is recommended!) Due to the pandemic, this class will specifically avoid the larger and more crowded parks in the area, so this time, students will have the opportunity to discover some small local gems in which to put their skills to work.)
Learn more about Taking it into Nature: Art Field Trips!
About Liesa
Liesa Lietzke has been backpacking and drawing wilderness for decades, in the Sierra Nevada and in southern California deserts. She has been exhibiting work and teaching art since 2001, then, earning her MFA in 2011, began teaching at the college level.
Creating Miniature Spaces
Instructor: Amy M. Ho
Saturdays, March 20 - April 24
6 sessions, 11:00am - 2:00pm PST. Online.
Image: Amy M. Ho, "Spaces From Yesterday: The Garage", still image from collaborative project with Bobby Dean Evans, Jr., 2016
Image Description: A miniature construction of the interior of a garage that is made out of translucent white materials. There is a washing machine and a dryer, shelving, and an ajar door, which light pours in from.
In the first class, students will look at how to translate two-dimensional materials into three-dimensional models. For the first assignment, they will create a miniature model of a home they have lived in. Students will bring a photograph of the home to the first class (alternatively, it can be any simple building that they like). Together, the instructor, Amy, and the student will decide on an appropriate scale to use, and will look at how to design and cut pieces out of chipboard to assemble into a three-dimensional model of the building. In later classes, students can color and paint the building accordingly.
Learn more about Creating Miniature Spaces!
About Amy:
Amy M. Ho builds installations that bring attention to our existence as both physical and psychological beings. She studied Art Practice at UC Berkeley and received her MFA at Mills College. She was selected as a KQED Woman to Watch in 2017 and was included in YBCA’s Bay Area Now 7 in 2014. She has previously exhibited at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Elmhurst Art Museum, and San Diego State University Downtown Art Gallery.
Drop-In Handbuilding: Ceramics & Sculpture Working Sessions
Instructor: Christopher Squier
Tuesdays, April 6 - 27, May 4-25, June 1-22 4 sessions/month, 5:00-8:00pm PST. Online
Image: Christopher Squier and Hadar Kleiman (collaboration)
Image Description: A ceramic relief sculpture hangs on a light beige wall. The sculpture is orange red at the top and fades to sea blue at the bottom. Concentric curly lines are inscribed into the surface and there is a diamond pattern inscription at the top.
In Drop-in Handbuilding, Christopher will lead an affordable weekly working session for artists and makers looking to find a community, get feedback on their work, and share their projects with each other. For the first session, students should bring sketches and ideas and start by generating maquettes. We'll address questions about different processes and material choices and experiment with different sculptural approaches. Each week will include time to present ongoing projects and concepts, question-and-answer sessions, and short (optional) critique sessions; however, the bulk of class time will be spent organically working and conversing.
Learn more about Drop-In Handbuilding: Ceramics and Sculpture Working Sessions!
About Christopher:
Christopher Squier is a visual artist whose work analyzes optics and the role of light in contemporary visual culture. His practice draws on research around luminescence and transparency to position vision as a historically altered and politically contentious experience. Recently, Squier was an artist-in-residence at Playa Art & Science Residency Program in Summer Lake, Oregon, where he developed a series of drawings based on Berenice Abbott's photogram camera, which captured the interference patterns of waves of light. Currently, he is working on a new series of sculptures inspired by Russian absurdist protests. See more of his work here and here.