This one-day graduate student symposium, organized by the Yale Center for British Art, explores the materiality of paint and the processes of painting both historically and in contemporary practice. It invites the consideration of paint as a substance, technically, as well as in terms of meaning. How have the ways in which paint has been used and interpreted developed over time? How are paint and painterly processes considered in today’s art studios and in art history? This symposium seeks to bring together the rich historiography on painting techniques with innovative recent art-historical methodologies for analyzing painting, investigating how paint has been interpreted and exploited by artists, scholars, critics, conservators, and audiences. We invite proposals for 25-minute papers on this theme from graduate students working in any discipline. Travel funds for speakers are available upon application. Please submit 300-word abstracts to Lisa Ford at lisa.ford@yale.edu.
The symposium coincides with two major exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art, a mid-career survey of the work of the British abstract artist Rebecca Salter (b. 1955), and an exhibition of the portraiture of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), organized jointly with the National Portrait Gallery, London. This juxtaposition provides a valuable opportunity to explore the versatility of paint and painterly processes by examining the work of two artists, an academic painter active at the turn of the nineteenth century, and a contemporary artist, both sharing a highly experimental approach to the use of media. Lawrence’s complex process of creating a chalk drawing on prepared canvas, which he then covered over with bravura strokes of paint, and Salter’s technique of applying, scraping away, and reapplying pigment, both challenged the canonical notion of painting’s flatness, as does Salter’s view of her practice as “making an object” rather than a two-dimensional surface. Both exhibitions include not only paintings but also works in other media, such as pastels, watercolors, and prints, highlighting the technical innovations and methods of both artists and inviting us, in different ways, to consider the complex relationships and often porous boundaries between media, such as painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- paint texture
- facture and finish
- painterliness
- painting as performance
- flatness
- color
- techniques and methods
- the historiography of materials
- drawing and painting
- painting conservation
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