Material Abstraction in Painting

with Laurel Sparks
PAINTING 683 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
June 15–28, 2025

This course explores the principles and practices of material abstraction in painting, focusing on the transformative qualities of paint and tactile media. Students will engage in a rigorous studio environment, experimenting with various materials and techniques—including acrylics, oils, collage, object assemblage, fabric, and industrial materials—to discover how texture, color, and form can convey meaning beyond representation. Through a combination of hands-on projects and critical discussions, participants will investigate the relationship between materials and visual language. Explorations of works by historical and contemporary artists such as David Hammons, Lynda Benglis, Jack Whitten, and Niki De Saint Phalle will expose students to practices that foreground tactility over narrative. Abstract experimental films and analog animations by Harry Smith and Jan Svankmajer will offer time-based theaters of alchemy and bricolage. Catalog essays from LA MOCA’s 2012–13 exhibition Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void 1949–1962 will highlight postwar experiments with the materiality of gesture and the expansion of the painting medium to incorporate performance, time-based, and assemblage strategies. These examples will span the earliest experiments to the most current practitioners who move the two-dimensional medium of painting toward the three-dimensionality of sculpture. Assignments will be open and experimental, beginning with 10 quick studies that combine three unlikely elements each. These studies will generate a personal aesthetic, culminating in a final presentation of each student’s distinct exploration of tactile abstraction. By the end of the course, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the symbolic and sensory implications of material choices, while expanding traditional boundaries in painting.

Laurel Sparks, Heaven and Earth Magic, 2024, woven canvas strips, waterbased paint, poured gesso, graphite, paper pulp, xmas tree ash, sequence, mirrors, bells, and velvet, 68 x 55 in.

Laurel Sparks (any/all) is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley based painter whose work intersects queer craft, textile, occult and abstract histories. Esoteric correspondence systems are encoded in patterns and glyphs that reflect mysteries of macro and micro cosmologies. In tandem, elements of decoration and artifice pay homage to queer and feminist counterculture expressions. Exhibitions include recent solo projects at Kate Werble Gallery, New York; Knockdown Center, Brooklyn; and group shows at Cheim and Read Gallery, New York; Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; and DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts. Awards include a MacDowell Fellowship, Elizabeth Foundation Studio Intensive Program at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Fire Island Artist Residency, SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship, Berkshire Taconic Fellowship, and an Elaine DeKooning Fellowship. Sparks holds an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at Tufts University. Sparks is an Associate Professor in painting at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.