Changing a figure’s surrounding transforms its mood and meaning. In “Drawing into Painting: Reconfiguring the Figure,” an online class at Seattle Artist League, Fran O’Neill led students in rethinking figure placement through drawing, collage, and painting. Using historical artworks, Zoom models, and personal photos, students reworked compositions, developed drawings into paintings, and examined how shifts …
FRAN O’NEILL Brooklyn-based artist Fran O’Neill creates vibrant, swirling paintings in myriad, intensely hued colors. While O’Neill pays homage to the great abstract painters of the 20th century, her aesthetic is also based on personal experience. She utilizes unexpected moments from her past as the jumping off point for artistic explorations that look to recreate …
Today, after skittering around with tasks, I was able to attend Fran’s Giant Figures Workshop, held in the spacious light-filled Drawing and Painting Studios at the Seattle Artist League. Years ago, when Lendy and I looked at this big Equinox warehouse space, we had NYSS style drawing intensives like this in mind, so it was …
Day 23 of our 30 day January Challenge was a drawing class trick from Fran O’Neill. The purpose is to trick artists into describing surface and surroundings that have as much interest and presence as the stuff that’s sitting on and in front of it. The most common response to this kind of exercise is …
How did it happen that all of our drawings and paintings are in rectangles? In my online figure drawing class last Sunday, I showed drawings by Matisse, Modigliani, and the very Matisse-like Pierre Boncompain. I talked about positioning the figure within the rectangle, thinking about how the shape of the figure and the shape of …
Pathways are directional marks and shapes for our eyes to follow across a 2 dimensional artwork. They are a powerful compositional tool to keep the viewer’s eyes engaged and moving around a composition. They’re also great for artists to practice, because they emphasize that if we’re to think compositionally, each part must play a role …
Most of the time when people draw something such as a still life, they draw the objects and then neglect everything around the objects, like the table holding it up, and the wall behind it. A drawing like this shows us a thing floating in nothing instead of an interaction of depth, volume, and surfaces …
We use the Zoom platform for online classes. Login codes are sent prior to the first class only. Some email systems such as Hotmail and Yahoo block our emails to you. Please check your junk folders, and if you have have not received your class info, please contact us (contact@seattleartistleague.com) 15-30 minutes before your class begins so we can reply with the login codes. We will get you into your class.
Collage
- Teacher: Fran O’Neill
- Course Length: 6 Weeks
- Start Date: Wednesday, July 23
- Time: 6:00 – 9:00pm PDT
Collage can be an incredible editing tool, great for testing ideas on canvas’, works on paper, or as a visual medium within itself. It is highly accessible and can be great fun in terms of experimenting with various media and quickly trying various compositional ideas without committing immediately. During this class, students will have the opportunity to experiment in all areas, from making a still life just using collage; to using as a way to see other solutions to works of their own that might feel incomplete, to building works using found images (either their own images or ones sourced from magazines, online etc.).
Materials list:
- Scissors
- Mat Medium (glue) + brush for glue
- Variety of brushes
- Cheap set of colored pencils
- Charcoal
- Pencils — variety of hb >b
- Eraser
For Collage, please stay with paper based products, for this class:
- Old Magazines (if anyone has these any more?)
- Or old works on paper..
- 20 sheets of 22×30″ watercolor paper
- Sketch book
Acrylic Paints:
- white
- yellow
- red
- blue
- black
Optional:
- Watercolor set
- Colored pieces of paper (that you might have), including black
- Paper with designs or writing on it..
- Consider different types of paper, any good art store will have a variety.
Students may also make photocopies of their works to use as material and/or old drawings.
Other materials may be suggested by the instructor.
Artwork by Lee Krasner, Matisse, Conrad Marca-Relli, Picasso, Romare Bearden
We use the Zoom platform for online classes. Login codes are sent prior to the first class only. Some email systems such as Hotmail block our emails to you. Please check your junk folders, and if you have have not received your class info, please contact us (contact@seattleartistleague.com) 15-30 minutes before your class begins so we can reply with the login codes. We will get you into your class.
Abstracts
- Teacher: Fran O’Neill
- Course Length: 6 Weeks
- Start Date: Wednesdays, begins July 23
- Time: 1:30 – 4:30 pm PDT
This class is designed to examine and push the boundaries of abstraction via composition. The ‘journey’ is the process, and it is expected that a participant will come with a willingness to experiment and to see the ‘process’ as the act, rather than looking for a final product.
A variety of strategies will be explored. It is hoped that by delving into different approaches, this will lead each artist to find a new (or expand upon current) visual language/vocabulary that may be used further, during and following the course.
Issues of scale, tiny to huge; the use of different formats will be challenged. We will experiment with the use of the rectangle, questioning the traditional idea.
Various ideas of space will be discussed, and the implications of these different kinds of space(s) and other compositional elements including, but not limited to: shape, texture, collage, as well as other languages and mediums within abstraction.
The quality of the image will be investigated. Individual ideas for a “powerful image” will be discussed and hopefully identified. Additionally strategies to address content and materials will be considered. Other structural ideas will be addressed, including the use of the grid, the organic spiral and geometry, all of which play a part in research into the language of abstraction.
There will be one:one discussion of the work throughout class, as well as group critiques.
Materials and supplies
Don’t sweat it! Whatever you have on hand is great!
- Smart phone or camera
- Brushes: A large selection of rounds from small sable to large house painting rounds
- Drawing paper, pencils and charcoal
- Scissors
Canvases
All sizes are suggestions, not requirements for this class. Whatever you have on hand is great.
- 2-3 small canvases – roughly 14” x 18” or 18” x 24”
- 2-3 medium canvas’ – roughly 28”x 34” or 30” x 48”-
Paints
Artist’s Choice: Oil, Acrylic, or Watercolor paints
Suggested Paint Colors
All colors are suggested, but are not requirements for this class. Whatever you have on hand is great. Suggested colors are listed in order of placement around the palette:
- Flake (or zinc) White
Titanium White
Cadmium Yellow Medium
Yellow Ochre
Lemon Yellow
Cadmium Red Light OR Medium
Alizarin Crimson
Quinacridone Magenta
Caput Mortem Violet OR Indian Red
Windsor Violet (W&N) (Dioxazine Violet)
Ultramarine Blue
Cobalt Blue
Cerulean Blue
Viridian
Cadmium Green Deep
Terre Verde
Raw Umber
Ivory Black
Peach Black
Image by Fran O’Neill