3.30.14 Day 1 with Matthew Bourbon

This week, the teens met Matthew Bourbon. Matthew is a painter living in Denton and currently an associate professor of art at the University of North Texas’s College of Visual Arts and Design. As well as being an educator and a fantastic artist, Matthew is also an active art critic, writing for esteemed publications such as Artforum.com, Flash Art, and Artnews, among others.

Class began with an informal artist talk about Matthew’s recent works. His paintings are smart. Each work combines diverse modes of painting and a handful of art-historical references. The works collide various tropes of painting with a wide array of markmaking techniques to make pictures that blur the boundaries of abstraction and representation. The artist spoke in detail about the collection of images that he culls through as he makes new works and stressed the importance of building up and utilizing visual resources in the creative process.

After his talk, Mathew then led the students through the exhibition David Bates. As a group, we explored the entire exhibition, focusing on the variety of formal qualities, approaches to markmaking, and range of styles that Bates incorporates.

Students were then given their assignment for the day. With sketchbooks in hand, the teen artists had thirty minutes to explore both floors of the museum and draw one element from the exhibition upstairs (David Bates) and one element from the exhibition downstairs (the permanent collection). When the students returned to the studio, they had the remainder of class to create a painting that merged the two disparate elements into one seamless painting.