The Sun on the Tongue: Painting & Poetry in the Landscape

with Arnold Kemp
PAINTING 680 001 | 3 credits | $100 lab fee
In-Person: January 5–18, 2025
Every day during the session (including weekends) 9:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m EST

Inspired by great artists like Etel Adnan and Elizabeth Bishop and the winter landscape of  Ox-Bow, this assignment driven studio course will activate writing for painters and painting for writers. Class discussions and readings will be wide-ranging with an emphasis on the creative process, the development of a personal voice, exchange of ideas, and practical topics in fine arts. Individualized critiques and meetings will follow the group discussions. Students will be expected to define a contextual framework and vocabulary for talking about their work as well as resolving form, content and technical issues. Areas of studio practice as well as outside of class assignments will explore expanded definitions of painting and writing that relate to the body and things of the world, The course is designed to prepare students to pursue individual creative projects in a setting that supports critical thinking, risk-taking, and the production of a body of work on paper and other supports. Students in this course will be assigned a semi-private studio space and can work in the media of their choice. We will take inspiration from readings and screenings from artists including; Etel Adnan, a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States,. Elizabeth Bishop, who worked as a painter as well as a poet, and her verse, like visual art, is known for its ability to capture significant scenes, and Renee Gladman, a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. Other readings will include Marie Howe’s The Good Thief, Deborah Digges’ Vesper Sparrows, Josh Ashberry’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, as edited by Erica Hunt. Assignments will invite students to adapt sensations experienced in the Ox-Bow landscape through words and drawing, inspired by Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, and to trade pieces of writings with confidants to develop works in watercolor or acrylic based on these writings. These exercises will require us to trust in what we can make of a synthesis of the known and unknown. Walking through the landscape, speaking to trees, looking for foxes, and screaming at the frozen lake will inform our final works.

Arnold J. Kemp, Stage, 2024, Cut maple plywood, 7 x 20ft, Edition of 3

Arnold J. Kemp is an artist and writer. He is Professor of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was previously the chair of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; Pollock-Krasner Foundation; Joan Mitchell Foundation, and Academy of American Poets. His writing has appeared in Callaloo, Three Rivers

       Poetry Journal, Agni Review, MIRAGE #4 Period(ical), River Styx, Nocturnes, Art Journal, Tripwire and in From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice. Kemp’s critical writing has appeared recently in Texte zur Kunst, October and Spike Art Magazine. He has presented his writing publicly at The Poetry Foundation, Chicago and Human Resources, Los Angeles. His work is shown internationally including at Biquini Wax, Mexico City, The Drawing Center and Martos Gallery, NY; The Neubauer Collegium at University of Chicago; Apalazzo Gallery, Brescia, Italy; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; JOAN, Los Angeles, The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas, and M. Leblanc, Chicago.