The purpose of this course is to equip the student with a fundamental understanding of the anatomy, structure, and design of the human body. The students will be presented with historic principles of artistic anatomy = which emphasize an accurate, geometric interpretation of the underlying skeletal structure of the body as well as a thorough examination of surface musculature in an effort to draw the figure with greater clarity, confidence, and accuracy.

3 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• A number of completed life drawings and anatomical studies of the live figure model
• Understanding of various drafting strategies used to represent a structured human form from both historical and contemporary sources
• The ability to seek out the various anatomical structures of the human figure and incorporate them into their work with greater confidence and conviction, both observation and memory

This course begins the process of developing the student’s ability to represent the human figure in pictorial space, clearly situated on a perspective ground plane. Emphasis is placed on gaining an in-depth understanding of the body’s underlying geometry and anatomical structure. A conceptual model of the figure that addresses volume, movement, proportion, perspective and light, is developed by correlating students’ drawing from observation with master drawings and diagrams that present the body as a series of interlocking volumes governed by hierarchical principles. Students work from casts in the Academy’s collection to reinforce and enhance drawing comprehension and skills. Instruction will emphasize the integration of the lessons from cast drawing and life drawing. Students will engage in self-directed work to explore and extend the forms, techniques, content and possibilities of drawing. Regular critique sessions are designed to inform and provide positive support to this self-directed work.

3 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• Improved accuracy of transposing visual phenomena to the page
• Accelerated abilities in observation, control and development in life drawing
• Enhanced understanding of strategy in drawing
• A personal focus, moving forward, for growth

This course examines the language and techniques of direct painting from the figure, still life and plaster casts. Students will paint using a variety of strategies derived from current and historical practice. Direct painting has been the method of choice for figurative painting in the modern era, but other techniques are encountered in the history of western art, often as foundations or reference studies for more layered development. Theoretical approaches to tonal structure and color theory will be addressed in depth. While emphasis in this course is on analytical seeing/interpreting, self-directed work plays a significant role. By providing a classroom structure for the review of independent work, the course achieves a vital dialogue between the method of direct painting and the myriad intentions of the artist.

3 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• Understanding of historical and current uses of direct painting
• Better control of values, edge handling, and color to create projection and recession through direct painting
• Understanding of color theory as it relates to the properties of oil pigments: Hue, Value, Chroma, and Temperature
• Ability to translate value to color
• Understanding of palette organization
• Understanding of how to work from bigger forms to smaller forms
• Understanding of Brush Handling
• Knowledge in creating successful compositions
• Knowledge of varied textures in work

Through observation of the live model, drawings from classic texts, and demonstrations by the instructor, this course provides knowledge of linear and horizontal proportions, planar and mass relationships, axis lines, bony landmarks, overall human anatomy, surface treatment, patinas, and composition, as well as tools and techniques for sculpting the human form.  Taken together, this knowledge is intended to give students greater clarity when interpreting the human form in drawing, painting, and sculpture. Also, through a class museum trip, occasional exhibition assignments, and class discussion, the course is intended to shed some light on the historical contexts surrounding the students’ own bodies of work.

3 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• Skills in sculpting—and, by extension, in drawing and painting—the human form, as well as understanding of what student’s would like to convey in their own bodies of work
• Essential knowledge of human proportions, anatomy, axis lines, planar and mass relationships, and composition, as well as of materials and techniques for manifesting 3-dimensional form
• Understanding of how the work addresses the history of ideas and human endeavor in art

This course emphasizes proportional accuracy, foreshortening, detail-mass relationships and the use of light and shadow to draw the figure as a convincing volumetric and spatial form. It integrates the conceptual geometricized model presented in Drawing I with the perceptual, naturalistic concerns presented by the live model. Long poses allow the student to develop drawings that reflect a more complete realization of the human form.

3 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• A specialized foundation for more advanced coursework
• A more holistic approach to drawing by interpreting form in the human body
• Explore in depth regions of the figure which are challenging to draw
• Technique in red chalk
• A greater understanding of drawing’s potential power through editing
• Understanding of mark making to forge a more effective strategy
• A reaffirmation of drawing from direct observation as vital to proficiency in visual problem solving
• Ability to incorporate museum research, as in the study of hatch mark, to build a more sophisticated handling within the drawing discipline

This course covers the development of art forms from the Renaissance to the late 19th century. Emphasis is on content, terminology, design, and style. Upon completion, students will be able to demonstrate an historical understanding of art as a product reflective of human social development. This course includes but is not limited to the art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Romanticism and Impressionism.

3 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• Ability to define the major art movements from the end of the Medieval period through post-Impressionism
• Ability to recognize major works of art from each of these movements
• Appreciation of the ways in which art of each period reflected socio-political and religious events
• Ability to define key art historical terms used in scholarly discussion of art (e.g., foreshortening, vanitas, Naturalism, contrapposto pose, etc.)
• A formal visual analysis on a piece of art chosen by the instructor that is also of interest to the student
• Experience in close-looking and writing about specific artworks to be discussed in the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art

This is a course in optical mixing of color through layering, the common painting method in pre-modern times and gaining in acceptance among contemporary artists. Students paint using underpainting (imprimatura), glazing and scumbling techniques. Through this method of episodically building up a painting, students are able to address a variety of problems in sequential fashion and indirect painting becomes a valuable resource for students’ independent studio work. Projects in this course include self-directed assignments and instructed classroom figure painting.

3 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• Basic knowledge of how to construct an oil painting utilizing indirect painting techniques
• A finished grisaille painting
• Understand layering semi-opaque and transparent layers of oil paint
• Practice of painting from life
• Understanding of anatomy and form

This course provides a thorough analysis of human anatomy through the construction of an écorché (an anatomical sculpture of a flayed figure). Each student begins by sculpting a skeleton out of plastilene, onto which is attached first the deep and then the superficial muscles of the body. Relying on Old Master drawings, diagrams, specially prepared dissection casts and the live model, the instructor demonstrates how the forms of the bones, muscles and tendons are transferred to the écorché.

3 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• Develop a conceptual and perceptual understanding of the anatomical, proportional, axial, mass and planar relationships necessary to the representation of a convincing human form in standing reference pose and in movement
• Interpret the forms of the live model and work more effectively from the imaginations, with or without a live model or a photo reference

Drawing from casts represents a quintessential practice within the academic curriculum. The Academy’s cast collection is a treasured repository of sculptural forms from Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance. As examples of great sculptural art, the casts reward close study with insights into how reality is abstracted, simplified, clarified and translated into artistic form. In addition to careful study of the full-size casts, particular attention is directed toward heads, facial features, hands, feet and drapery. Artistic theories of light and shade are presented. Both linear and dimensional depictions of sculptural form are extensively explored.

3 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• Develop an understand the complexity of the human figure and other subjects in terms of simpler mass concepts
• Draw the figure and other subjects, both as a whole and in part, with clarity and understanding by determining the design aspects and considering the fundamental building blocks of structure
• Develop ability to draw proficiently from life and imagination

This course is designed to recapitulate the fundamental ideas presented in sculpture one, although at a larger scale and over an extended period of time, they are: proportion, linear and volumetric, the sculptures relation to the ground plane, i.e. the main plumb line, carrying angles of all elements of the figure, the essential geometry underlying and describing the structural characteristics of the body, the conversion of the perceptual experience of the model’s body into sculptural convention.

Additional concerns to be discussed during the semester are: compositional organization of interior forms, their relationship to anatomical structures, and methodologies of modeling technique to represent these structures. Surface development will be discussed in terms of surface tension(s), and as the student’s ultimate understanding of form development.

3 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• Further develop the students analytical and perceptual abilities
• Learn to work at an incrementally larger scale, approaching life scale

Students are assigned a studio for their independent work on their Independent Project in the beginning of their third semester. Students are expected to produce a body of work, which is exhibited at the end of the third semester. They meet with their advisors, individually, four times throughout this semester to review progress on their work and receive constructive feedback.

Each student is required to complete a written Artist Statement in support of his or her final CFA Independent Project. The Artist Statement is meant to place the student’s work into the context that is intended by the student, explaining personal significance or goals for the work, historical, cultural or artistic points of reference, techniques or methods used and their intended purpose in the production of the student’s work. Students are required to present this written statement during Final Critiques of the Independent Project, its exhibition and accompanying Artist Statement are is considered part of the CFA candidate’s evaluation.

6 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• The individual student, in consultation with Independent Project Committee, agrees upon the scope of the work to be completed for the Independent Project and the required, accompanying written statement.
• The student meets with their Independent advisors, individually, three times throughout this semester to review progress on their work and receive constructive feedback.
• Each student is required to complete a written Artist Statement in support of his or her final CFA Independent Project. The Artist Statement is meant to place the student’s work into the context that is intended by the student, explaining personal significance or goals for the work, historical, cultural or artistic points of reference, techniques or methods used and their intended purpose in the production of the student’s work.
• Students are required to present this written statement during Final Critiques of the Independent Project. The Independent Project, its exhibition and accompanying Artist Statement are is considered part of the CFA candidate’s evaluation.

The course discusses the issues and art movements of the late nineteenth century to the present, moving from the primarily Eurocentric perspective of Post Impressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism to contemporary art as global phenomenon. Consideration is given to the diversity of artistic expressions in this period within their cultural, theoretical, and political contexts. Particular attention is given to the impact on art of such late 20th- century cultural phenomena as feminism, transgender and queer identity politics, race and ethnicity, multiculturalism, environmental awareness and climate change, the AIDS epidemic, the explosion of the media and technology (video to the Internet), and to the ways in which these phenomena have spawned new definitions of art (Relational Aesthetics and Social Practice).

3 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• Ability to define the major art movements from the end of post-Impressionism to the contemporary period
• Ability to recognize major works of art from each of these movements
• Appreciation of the ways in which art of each period reflected socio-political and religious events
• Ability to define key art historical terms used in scholarly discussion of art (e.g., Surrealism, Color Field Painting, Abstract Expressionism, Photorealism, etc.)
• A formal visual analysis on a piece of art chosen by the instructor that is also of interest to the student
• Experience in close-looking and writing about specific artworks in the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art

This course is intended to introduce linear perspective as a more advanced system for creating pictorial space on a two-dimensional surface, and most importantly as tool for influencing our memory and therefore content. Perspective has the ability to both define space and remove us from reality. Students will become more familiar with the analytical approach to the language of perspective. The objective is to begin a deeper investigation into how objects and figures effect our perception of space. By observing how three-dimensional forms project onto a two-dimensional grid students can begin to understand how the geometric structures found in human anatomy relate to a linear system.

3 credits

• Learn how to depict a model in space using constructed methods of Linear Perspective
• Analyze the changing landscape of pictorial space by appreciating the advancement of linear in the 14th century into the 21st century
• Develop a composition in Plan View then project both figures and objects in space
• Generate and illustrate a grid in one and two-point perspective with an emphasis on eye level, cone of vision, vanishing points, and measuring points
• Advance practical application of linear perspective by placing three-dimensional figures and objects in a two-dimensional space without construction of a grid
• Use “perspective scale” in order to more closely represent visual relationships.
• Affect the viewer’s experience by way of an illusionist space – “It is a subtle role, having to do with the spectator’s experience of his or her location in space with respect to the physical surface of the painting”
• Use geometrical forms relating to anatomical structures to render a figure defined within a perspectival system
  Understanding that perspective is a way to situate and communicate light
• Use perspective to depict space displaced by the model

The purpose of this class is to introduce the theory and practical application of color and design for artists. During the first half of the semester, the class will explore the fundamental historic aspects of Western pictorial design and its use by artists to compose organized and compelling visual arrangements. The second half of the semester will be devoted to developing in the students an understanding of the language of color, ways to achieve color harmony, and a sound and practical method for controlling color in both palette layout and application.

3 credits

Core Learning Outcomes

• Demonstrate an understanding of how to establish complex color strings, practically mix and employ subtle color gradations
• Comprehend and utilize seven common color harmonies
• Understand and employ the basic elements of design and integrate this information into specific frames of reference based on geometric construction and harmonic proportions