Painting & Public Art

In creating these works, students stressed the process rather than the artistic product and, like artist Sol Le Witt, defined painting as “an activity on a flat plane.” Their focus was on abstraction: they sought to explore and evoke the nature of objects, materials, and places rather than imitate their surface appearances. Students used traditional methods (paint wash on paper, acrylics on paper and canvas) as well as more unusual tools and materials (earth, trash, recycled materials). Throughout the course, students analyzed their creative process and tested potential relationships between aesthetics and ethics in art—between “good forms” and forms that in some way contribute or allude to the “common good.”