Drawing Place in Watercolor & Gouache

with Carrie Gundersdorf
PAINTING 672 001 | 1.5 credits | $50 Lab Fee
August 4 - 10, 2024

This course explores materials and methods of transparent and opaque watercolor (gouache). Watercolor is historically associated with observing the natural world through works such as botanical and wildlife illustrations, J.M.W. Turner’s ethereal landscapes, Charles Burchfield’s transcendental images, and Joseph Yoakum’s reminisced locations. This course celebrates the ease and transportability of working in watercolor and gouache and transforms the landscape into the studio. We will use the Ox-Bow environment as a source of material for developing a personal approach to drawing the space around us. This course will help students build a basic understanding of watercolor and gouache – its materials: paint, brushes, and paper, how to mix color, layer washes, build compositions while masking out areas, and how to use mark-making to articulate surfaces. We will look at artists including John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keefe and contemporary artists, Dawn Clements, Shazia Sikander, and Amy Sillman. Exercises involving color, observation, and mark-making will help familiarize students with the medium. Students will demonstrate creating color with value, layering washes, and mixing color. They will learn to mask a foregrounded object, build a drawing with layers of color, and techniques for painting wet into wet.

Carrie Gundersdorf’s works on paper reference early modernist painting and natural and astronomical phenomena. In recent work, Gundersdorf transcribes patterns found on seashells to create pictorial compositions, while leaving the test patterns on the edges of the paper to reveal process. Her work aims to expose small moments of discovery. Gundersdorf has had solo exhibitions at the Korn Gallery, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at 106 Green, New York; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, California; La Box, Bourges, France; Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles; and Loyola Museum of Art, Chicago. Gundersdorf’s work has been reviewed in Art Review, Artforum.com, Artnet, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Artadia Award in Chicago and the Bingham Fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Gundersdorf received her BA from Connecticut College and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Carrie Gundersdorf, Moncuri Cone, back, 2023, colored pencil and watercolor on paper, 28 x 22 in.