How did you learn art?

Wow Mayben.

Olive, I love all of these pieces you shared! I know what you mean about being many people in one body. I also was all over the place, but I think that's how we find ourselves.

Here's another drawing...I guess it's an abstract of a whale? An angel whale? I have no idea.

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It kind of goes with this watercolor. I don't know when I did this one. Maybe I was thirteen?

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This I did when I was a little older-- maybe high school years, but I didn't attend:

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These are the 80s:

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Arty, these are all just great and I don't know what that first one is either but it is freakin' fantastic. I love the thick and thin lines, the scroll work, the whole thing! ❤ ❤ ❤
 
I didn't start Art School for a couple of years after High School. I was seriously torn between wanting to be a writer or a visual artist. If I had it to do today I might major in Film.

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-Copy after Michelangelo's Ignudi from the Sistine Ceiling
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-Copy after Michelangelo's Study for the Libyan Sibyl

While I eventually majored in painting, I initially hated painting... especially oils and acrylic. I was obsessed with drawing and line which was difficult to maintain in oils. I took five years of life drawing (the Cleveland Institute was a 5-year program) and spent endless hour making copies of drawings by the old masters from reproductions in books or at the museum. The Cleveland Museum of Art was right across the street from the school and free. Drawing after the masters teaches you not merely how to draw what you see... but how to manipulate the various art elements to convey what you see. These two copies after Michelangelo look a bit heavy-handed now... but I was a Freshman at the time... and they did help to earn me a scholarship for the next year.

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-Dutch Landscape

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-Dad's Army Jacket

The best paintings I did as a Freshman were watercolors. I butted heads with my professors who swore by Cezanne's watercolors with their large areas of white and rapid washes of one or two layers at most. I was looking a lot at Turner and Morreau who used layer after layer of color. At this time I discovered the blow dryer which allowed me to rapidly apply multiple layers.

Toward the end of my first year in art school through my 3rd year I became enamored with charcoal and acrylic and the German Expressionists and Edvard Munch. My works tended to be quite dark and moody... even still life. I brought spotlights into my studio space at school and often used these to create dramatic lights and shadows.

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-Bob

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-Still Life with Spotlight

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-The Late Show

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-The Prodigal Son

The quality of these reproductions is pretty bad due to the fact that they are scans from slides... but I no longer have most of these works, so I'll have to make do.
 
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-Daisy

Through my final years in art school, my drawings remained dark and moody...

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-Couple

While my paintings became increasingly loose...

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-West-siders

... and influenced by German Expressionism.

While I was in art school, I discovered the work of Lucian Freud. They actually had an exhibition of his prints while I was still a student. Unfortunately, New York and thus the majority of art periodicals were dominated by Neo-Expressionism, Minimalism/Abstraction, and Conceptual Art. The New York Museums famously rejected offering an exhibition of Freud's paintings. But Freud was rapidly becoming one of the most influential artists... especially among younger artists. I went through my own Freud-influenced dead-pan realism phase myself:

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-Couple

After art school I spent a year and a half in New York... Jersey City to be exact. I saw a lot of art visiting all the galleries and museums repeatedly... but I didn't get a lot of art work done. When I moved back to Cleveland I started back to school to earn my teaching license while working full time and getting married. Again... not a lot of time for art. What art I did at this time was largely abstract. Unfortunately, I have no records of the art of this period. And then we had a dispute with our studio landlord and so I was forced to work at home... making small collages...

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-Excursions into Greek Philosophy

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-Greek Veil

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-Ancient Architecture in Ruins


I also made some ceramic works while taking classes so that I could use the school studios:

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-Meditations (My works are the four towers)
 
The last things I did before returning to figurative painting some 12+ years ago, were a number of "paintings" inspired by two favorite artists: Paul Klee and Joseph Cornell. The "paintings" had a physical depth like a shadow box... and the parts were movable... like a puzzle:

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-Shattered Waltz

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-Walking on Eggshells

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-Mephisto Waltz


As I mentioned in my post on the Pastels board, around this time, I was feeling frustrated with my work. My walls were covered with reproductions of favorite paintings... all figurative:

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... and the artists I look at constantly in books were all figurative painters. I'll also note that my job teaching art to children continually reminded me of what I loved about art... drawing/painting things.... especially people.

At this time, I made a trip to Washington to see an exhibition of Anselm Kiefer's work at the Hirshhorn... but I was absolutely blown away by an exhibition of Venetian Renaissance painters (Titian, Giorgione, Bellini, Veronese, etc...) at the National Gallery. I went back to Washington to see it again a week later. On returning the second time, I put all my abstract works away and started painting again. Initially, I struggled a great deal... and so I focused upon simple still-life subjects: books, rolls of toilet paper, empty bottles, etc...

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Can anyone tell that red is my favorite color? 😜
 
Keep that red away from the light! I like red too. :)

I have finally drawn something on a canvas this morning, but I'm having an eye issue at the moment and have been ordered to an Ophthalmologist later today. Not sure about getting any paint on it, but I'm going to be using that same red on it.
 
@stlukesguild - I really like your abstracts. Even the red ones have a certain serenity to them. It's also interesting to see your development from the more figurative works you did in art school to the abstracts back to the representational stuff. I do like the expressionism of your student work as well.
 
Okay, so some of this stuff is a little embarrassing, but here is some early work, and I haven't posted it because I just don't have great pics. They are all very small because I scanned them a million years ago from bad slides.

but these are from about 89 to 1992 or 93. I sort of experimented with some different styles, especially after I discovered oils in 1990. I began to play with abstract at that point and things changed for me after that, but this was kind of the development. These aren't exactly in order, but, more or less...

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OK, you guys inspired me to search for what student work I could find in my old scans...

This is a set of "cards" I did in 1997, my first year studying printmaking. I got obsessed with gum arabic transfers, which are basically like photo-lithographs pulled from Xerox prints. These are a mess, but I still like them because they were fun to make. I photo-copied quotes from Dante's Inferno, combined with Xerox self-portraits. Transfers were printed in red and black on Rives BFK, and the cards were then coated in a flesh-colored wax. I have the date marked as 1996, but this definitely would've been 97 or early 98.

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This is probably from 1998 or 99, a woodcut using scrap wood.

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Charcoal figure study from 1998.

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Collage from 1999. I think the woman's face is a copy from a Peter Milton print. This also includes a clip from an intaglio print I did. I was really interested in using almost random juxtapositions of images to create implied narratives. Most of the studio work I was doing during my last couple of years was more photo-based, but I was trying to figure out ways to integrate a more drawing-based and process oriented approach.

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It has been interesting reading this thread. (y) I like the photos here and the stories. I'll still read some pages but mean while I write about my learning experiences.

Ok, few words about my art education. I have participated some oil painting workshops and atelier. Since everyone is adding photos I also add some I did in the workshops/classes.

My first ever oil painting/art class was a workshop in Italy, Florence. It was a landscape painting workshop and lasted one month. The organizer was the Florence Academy of Art. I was very beginner to oil painting and it was difficult to stand next to the good painters but I learned a lot.
(I can't find the photos of the paintings from that trip but if I do I'll add them here later if it's possible to edit.)

The following year I went to another workshop to Italy, Umbria, with few other artists that I had known in the earlier class. I was given false information and thought it would be a still life workshop but it was landscape again. The teacher was one of the head teachers in Florence Academy of Art (different than earlier year´s teacher) and I learned more from both the teacher and other participants who actually were art teachers themselves too.
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This is getting boring but ... next workshop was in Italy again with a teacher that is one of the leading plein air painters in the world now and was already then and makes his living by selling art in New York and elsewhere in US the past 10 or 20 yrs so this workshop I chose not by location but by the teacher that truely masters plein air. I again learned a lot and had fun. Made life time friends and have met some later in Europe painting plein air together. I still repeat in my mind this workshop teacher´s advices when I paint and use the materials that he uses. The plein airs below are from Marsillana, Italia. The 1st one is Orbetello. The castello is Corsini Castle. The ancient churches are in San Bruzio in Toscana-Grosseto.
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Then the story makes a turn because I was in a situation that I didn´t know what to do: I was measuring in my head if I should go back to my first profession, engineering (work hard and be rich), or continue with art (work hard and be poor). My husband thought I should continue with art and so I decided to go to an art school full time student to Italy again. The school is an atelier actually and it´s name is Angel Academy of Art and it´s located in Florence. I went there to do the full program but I haven´t finished it. Here I add some works I did while I was there: 3 pencil Bargues, pencil Old Master copy, life figure drawings (long poses), and some charcoal cast. All below. We did there a lot of drawing and homework but I can't post it all:
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Last fall I participated a brand new local atelier here near where I live (only 7 minutes drive from my front door) which is profounded by a Florence academy teacher and I wanted to learn what I missed in the other atelier in Florence: to draw a cast with charcoal properly. The ear was a struggle and was never actually accepted as a finished work. I continued this year in January painting a cast with oils but the classes were stopped in March because of corona virus restrictions. Below you can see the charcoal cast done in a local new atelier here near me:
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In between those workshops and classes explained above I went to a short two week lasting portrait painting workshop to Atelier Madrid, which in Madrid, Spain. It was all very good and I learned a lot. I have done portraits with the method I learned there. This workshop was in December and I was enjoying not only the wonderful atelier classes but also the city of Madrid with all the Christmas stuff all around. Here's the life painting we did of the very good (she didn't move a bit in two weeks!) model Marisa. mine became a little too dark in color because I hadn't really painted portraits before so I had no idea how to handle light, face, color or anything. I just followed teacher's advice.
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After that I participated a portrait painting workshop to Seville, Spain. Again the teacher is a world wide well known artist but that was a big mistake because he didn´t want or come to teach me nor the lovely Sevillan student next to me at all. We asked the teacher to come and teach us too but he always said ´no, I have to be over there now´ and he never came to us. We were puzzled and didn't know why. Well I painted this portrait below by watching the Spanish student on my other side painting hers with instructions and plenty of help from this teacher. She had almost the same angle to the model so I could follow her at least since the teacher didn´t want to teach me. This workshop was only a short 5 day thing but it was frustrating. I haven´t taken workshops from artists after that. I don´t dare. Below is the painting I did in this catastrophic workshop:
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Now I´m painting landscapes and portraits by myself with this kind of ´education´ background. Still life I´m now learnig on an Internet class by a teacher I admire but we have classes only few times per month. I feel I'm learning a lot with him. Just wanted to share with you all how did I learn art. 😌🖌
 
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Moscatel, your work is amazing. Stunning really. And your story is not boring at all. I enjoyed reading it. Thank you for sharing it and all these wonderful images! You are so talented. :)
 
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