Field Illustration

with Josh Dihle
PAINTING & DRAWING 678 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 lab fee
August 3–9, 2025

Inspired by the landscape and wildlife of Ox-Bow, this class invites students to develop an illustrative portfolio in pencil, ink, watercolor, and gouache. Students will build effective and inventive travel easels to explore campus and, working both outside and in the studio, will develop a personal approach to rendering and responding to the plants and animals that call Ox-Bow home. Demonstrations will cover methods for effective color mixing and composing in the field as well as techniques for recreating botanical structure, basic animal anatomy, and biological textures including bark, shell, and feathers. We will review the work of John James Audubon, Walton Ford, Evelyn Statsinger, and Kiki Smith and students will carry a naturalist pocket guide for reference. Onsite and studio drawing assignments will be accompanied by readings and discussions of naturalist poetry by Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, and Sharon Olds. Assignments will challenge students to notice the nuance in nature and will include a bug hunt, with invertebrates sketched in graphite, and a watercolor assignment that gives visual expression to a work of poetry or literature. Students will be encouraged to propose a final project inspired by their observations.

Josh Dihle (he/him) With a hand for detail and an eye on the natural world, Dihle blends painting, carving, and drawing to open visionary portals into the heart. He is the co-founder of experimental art platforms Color Club and Barely Fair and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also created The Sugar Hole, an ice cream shop staffed by puppets. Solo exhibitions include M+B,Los Angeles; Andrew Rafacz, Chicago; 4th Ward Project Space Chicago; McAninch Arts Center, Chicago; and Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago; Dihle's work has been exhibited in group shows nationally and internationally, including Gaa Gallery, New York; MASSIMODECARLO Vspace,Milan, Italy; University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, Maine; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois; Essex Flowers Gallery, New York; Ruschman, Mexico City, Mexico; and Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy. His work and curatorial projects have been written about in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, New City, Artspace, The Washington Post, and The Art Newspaper, among others. Dihle lives and works in Chicago.

Funny Books

with Jessica Campbell
PAINTING & DRAWING 603 001 | 1.5 credits
$100 lab fee | August 3–9

The comics we first encounter in the world are funny: gag panels, newspaper strips, children's comic books. Humor is so fundamental to the origin of the medium that is incorporated in the name (ie "comics"). Throughout history, humor has remained a tool of the dispossessed due to its malleable ability to disarm; critique; process trauma; incisively observe; destabilize hierarchy; catalyze political action; and foster connection and joy. Because of how comedy functions (by making people laugh) and how comics circulate (as ephemeral mass media), both can be dismissed as more frivolous than serious forms of academic and artistic inquiry. The ease with which jokes and comics are overlooked is also their strength, allowing them to exist in the margins, piercing social conventions otherwise impenetrable. The accessibility of humor and comics can provide space for those shut out from the halls of power. In this class, we will investigate what it means to make funny books through production, critique, and close readings of work by other artists like Lisa Hanawalt, Walter Scott and Lynda Barry. We will explore comics through a variety of approaches designed to strengthen writing, drawing and the myriad ways in which humor can be used. Through at least one project in this course, students will investigate the process of generating ideas, writing and drawing comic strips using pen and ink.

Jessica Campbell (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist who works predominantly in textiles, drawing and comics. Drawing on a wide range of influences, including science fiction, art world politics, and her evangelical upbringing, Campbell explores ways to reflect heterogeneity through a combination of disparate media, subjects, and tone. Whether through cartoony depictions or the use of unorthodox material, her work often wields humor as a device for managing trauma.

She is the author of three graphic novels, including the recent Rave (Drawn and Quarterly, 2022), and her comics have been published by MoMA, the New Yorker, Hyperallergic and the Nib, among other publications. She has had solo exhibitions at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; The Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, MI; Western Exhibitions in Chicago; and Field Projects in NYC. She is an Assistant Professor of Expanded Drawing at York University in Toronto.