This 8 week course is intended to provide students with a compositional skill set to supplement the development of their own personal images or work developed in other classes. Course content includes: understanding the visual potential of the 2-dimensional picture plane, design principles that affect communication and interpretation of an idea/concept, visual aesthetics, and an awareness of and effectively using compositional variables and tools. Students will develop a greater range of methods for achieving visually engaging images and be aware of a variety of options for composition and content development in order to better visually achieve their intended goal.
Topics include: Form/shape, scale, direction, placement, depth, space, density, visual hierarchy, content relationships, contrast and contradiction, development and effect of surface, media & mark and useful colour principles. Practical studio work will be a priority and students will be encouraged to work in the medium of their choice (drawing, painting, photography, digital). All media are welcome. Each practical session will be prefaced with a lecture/discussion and image examples. In-class work will range from short compositional studies, to reworking existing work and designing new ideas. Students working both representationally and abstractly are welcome.
Spring 2021: 8 Weeks: Base Tuition: $355
Please Note: Due to COVID 19, special policies and regulations will apply. Students must be in agreement with these health and safety regulations and TSA policies in order to enrol.
Notes: Gillian Iles' practice consists of painting, sculpture and video/projection. She has exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Brooklyn, Chicago, Miami, Montreal and Toronto in public institutions, university galleries, artist-run centres and commercial galleries. Her work has been highlighted in Canadian Art, Mix Magazine, Toronto Life Magazine, as well as the National Post and The Globe and Mail. She is featured in the book Carte Blanche Volume 2: Painting. Gillian was a founding member of two artist-run galleries in Toronto - Propeller and Loop, and is currently a member of the Red Head Gallery in Toronto. Her environmental scale installations include combinations of paintings, sculptures, constructions video and projection, creating installations incorporating both real and illusionary space, transforming exhibition spaces into a composite of alternate realities. The composite imagery presents an array of contradictions as a sensory collage of fleeting instants that shape greater social identity & individual perception. Gillian teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Sheridan College and the Toronto School of Art in Canada.Please keep your receipts to all purchases in case you need to return any materials.
For the first class:
Please bring appropriate materials for doing many compositional roughs (up to 8 in total). These roughs can be drawings or paintings (e.g. media can be wet or dry media as suits the artist).
Later in the course, more sustained images will be created through the reworking of existing work and creation of entirely new work.
Media and materials decisions are the student’s choice.
Students are encouraged to work in and with the media that best compliments their own art-making practice.
This can include: painting media (oil, water-mixable oil, acrylic, watercolour, and gouache), drawing media (dry – graphite, charcoal, conte, pencil crayon, pastel and wet-inks), collage, digital media and photography.
Students are welcome to change media throughout the course.