7 - 8 December, 2024 - 10:00 A.M.—5:00 P.M.

PRIVATE ZOOM WORKSHOP, ONLINE STUDIES

PURPOSE OF THE COURSE:

106 years ago, on October 31, 1918, the world lost one of its enduring cult heroes, the artist Egon Schiele. He was just 28 years old, and passed away three days after his pregnant wife, Edith, also succumbed to the Spanish flu. To this day, we are transfixed by the drawings of Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele, an artist who leveraged his supreme ambition and talent within a dire existence, into one of more storied creative careers imaginable in the 20th century. In Schiele’s drawings, the fierceness of his emaciated bodies, gripping and confrontational, open a doorway into observation, to a time of artistic reassessment.

This live, online drawing workshop is open to all levels. Centered upon famed Austrian Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918) and specifically devoted to his works on paper, we’ll embed ourselves in his world of angst and glory, grappling with the way Schiele’s unrivaled linework conjures such energetic threads of conviction. 

By copying two Egon Schiele drawings, students will approach the course content as artist-researchers. We’ll study the treatment of his marks: their underlying form references, gestures, and how Schiele’s demeanor manifested through the artist’s uninhibited calligraphy. By feeling through his graceful linear drawings, we will know our own lines better. We might even ask, ultimately, how could an artist who clashed with such terrestrial horrors generate works that continue to seize the viewer’s imagination with a “primordial” beauty?  

Students will exit the course with greater analytical powers, having used the drawing language to gain a more expressive and exacting visual vocabulary. I will teach participants how to create perceptive and revealing drawing copies, containing hallmarks of pure line that only the astute might notice. Those insights will count as reliable and lasting resources of knowledge within our own creative practice. 

Materials: Charcoal, smooth paper, and gouache – a materials list will be emailed to all registrants

*The title is inspired by a written passage in Danielle Knafo's book: "...The self-portrait was one of the major themes in Schiele's art; and his oeuvre is a highly personal one, chronicling the major events and important people who figured in his lifetime and reflecting the devouring intensity with which he faced his most intimate emotional experiences."