Drawing Place in Watercolor & Gouache
with Carrie Gundersdorf
PAINTING & DRAWING 672 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 Lab Fee
August 24–30, 2025
Watercolor is historically associated with observation of 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 will help students build a basic understanding of the materials associated with both transparent watercolor and opaque watercolor (gouache)—paint, brushes, and paper—as well as the techniques: layering washes, working wet into wet, and using the white of the paper to create color. This course celebrates the ease and transportability of working in watercolor and gouache and brings the landscape into the studio. In addition to using the Ox-Bow environment as a source of subject matter, we will look at past and contemporary artists, including John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, Dawn Clements, Amy Sillman, and Josephine Halvorson. Exercises involving color, observation, and mark-making will help familiarize students with the medium. The class will enable students to build a personal approach to working with the idea of place.
Carrie Gundersdorf, Snowflake Cone #2, non-photo blue, 2024, colored pencil and watercolor on paper, 28 x 22 in.
Carrie Gundersdorf (she/her) is an artist and educator who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Portland, Maine. She has had solo exhibitions at La Loma Projects, Los Angeles; 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, Art on Paper, Chicago Tribune, and Time Out Chicago. 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.