Romanticism & Nature in Painting

with Mari Eastman & Paula Kamps
PAINTING & DRAWING 682 001 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
July 21–August 2, 2025

This class will focus on painting and drawing from nature. After starting the day with meditation and movement, we will make sketches and watercolors of Ox-Bow’s unique surroundings. Alternating between a painterly approach and writing to reflect on thoughts and impressions, we will touch upon European Romanticism and Asian landscape painting. In addition to reading passages from Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, and Buddhist texts, we will view works by artists including Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Emil Nolde, Giorgio Morandi, George Stubbs, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Marlene Dumas, as well as illustrators such as Beatrix Potter and Maria Sibylla Merian. Thinking together about the meaning of the sublime and the importance of what Isaiah Berlin called “longing for the unbounded and the indefinable . . . an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life,” we will stress solitary studio and reading time as much as encouraging students to explore nature on their own. In the first week of the course, we will supplement local florals with foraged natural elements to design ephemeral arrangements via a lesson in ikebana. These living sculptures will serve as still-life subjects. Finding inspiration in Ox-Bow’s dynamic weather and its rich flora and fauna, we will sketch in the field, draw from canoes, hike, paint the constellations at night, and bird-watch. We will study our subjects and utilize the techniques necessary to translate their textures and colors, starting in watercolor en plein air before finishing works in oil and acrylic in the studio. The class will culminate with an installation of final works.

Mari Eastman, Studio Assistant, Mari Eastman, 2024, oil on canvas, 14 x 12 in.

Mari Eastman’s (she/her) work emerges from a pictorial study of images from magazines and the internet which become intertwined with personal narratives, executed in an intentionally loose manner. Eastman holds an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at Bombon Projects, Barcelona; Broadway Gallery, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Orange County Museum of Art, the Berkeley Museum of Art, Cherry and Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; Spruth and Magers, Munich; Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York; and Maureen Paley, London; among other venues. Her work has been included in such publications as Modern Painters, The New York Times, and on the websites Artforum.com and Contemporary Art Daily. Eastman lives and works in Chicago and is on the faculty at The University of Chicago.

Paula Kamps, The Heralds, 2024, distemper and oil on canvas, 15.74 x 11.81 in.

Paula Kamps (she/her; German, b. Cologne, Denmark) is a poet and a painter. Her work focuses on recollection, fabulation, and the perception of narrative. Unhinging the artist's expected role as the operator of signification or meaning, her works joyfully dawdle in a space of transposition between what is read and what is seen, between what is felt and what is thought. From washes of pigment and inks across linen, Kamps' builds strange reveries, often uncomfortable, often feeling incomplete. With figures hazy or obscured and a recurring, but arcane symbology, her works elegantly hint on subjects persistent throughout art history—the unreliability of memory, the evasiveness of meaning, and our continual desire to understand one another. In 2016, she graduated from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Recent solo exhibitions include Word of Honor at M.LeBlanc, Chicago (2024); Cold Customs at eastcontemporary, Milan (2022); Shoot The Moon at Mou Projects, Hong Kong (2022) and At The Pawn Shop at Sans titre, Paris (2021). She regularly publishes her poetry in the form of artist's books and advises graduate students in painting at SAIC.