Classes at Free Columbia
Free Columbia began in 2009 as a year long program based in experiential two dimensional art: painting and drawing. Over the years Free Columbia expanded to include puppetry, Goethean science, social change, children’s classes and much more, but the base in experience runs through all of our programs.
Now visual art at Free Columbia is taught in a variety of programs. Some years we have residential programs. Some years short courses and low residency programs. We have new online classes and we teach week long and weekend workshops in many places around the country. Visual art is also part of the MC Richards program. Through all of these programs runs the investigation in to the realm of quality. Example how is red different from blue on a feeling level; what does heaviness feel like as opposed to levity?
One of our students once said, “I completed a four year BFA and they never used the word experience, you guys use it everyday”.
To enter into the realm of quality is a lesson in slowing down and listening to locate a perceptive capacity in yourself that goes beyond sympathy and antipathy. All of Free Columbia’s work in the visual arts encourages this perspective.
Some thoughts from Laura Summer
When I was a student in painting school I was given cloud studies as an assignment. Sitting on the lawn, gazing at the sky, trying to capture on paper the form language of the clouds, I had a major realization - God is much better at composition than I am. The natural world is filled with interesting, dynamic, coherent and incoherent harmony, vastly more interesting than what I can draw when I think of cloud, or tree or stone. As a painter I wondered how can I harvest some of this vast harmony and have it inform my work? So started the past 30 years of struggling to bring what is behind the world, what creates the world, out onto the canvas. It is never completely successful, but it is ever more and more a fascinating exploration.
The world of two dimensions worked with by the painter is lawful. Color is lawful, as is line, surface and composition. How can we learn to respect this lawfulness while at the same time playing in its realm? Blue is a reality that has a certain quality, it makes me feel a certain way. When I put it next to red something very specific happens that is different than if I put it next to yellow or black. How can the painter develop a sensitivity to feel this lawfulness and at the same time be in a state of experimentation and dialogue. Where is the realm that exists between expressionism, (it’s all about what I want to say), and impressionism, (it’s all about what is outside me). We can not only find this realm, we can live there as painters, and be continuously nourished and inspired by moving between the polarity of self and other.
How do we do it ? By patiently exercising our perceptive capacities while painting and drawing. By painting blue and adding red, then painting blue and adding yellow. By comparing these feelings, locating the realm of quality within me. Where do these feelings live? Then bringing these feeling capacities to my work. For me it’s not about what I want to tell the world, but it’s also not about what blue wants to tell the world, it’s about my conversation with blue and what is said there. My conversation will be different from yours, just as my conversation with my neighbor over the fence about how to grow sweet peas in the sun, will be different from yours with that same neighbor from the shady side of her yard. Both conversations hold the potential of interest.
Experimenting with new forms is always challenging and so it is the perfect activity for artists, for artists stand always on the edge, sensing the vast discomfort and the exhilarating strength of the unknown. My question is can we work here together, find new forms and help each other forward?
Contact Laura Summer if you’re interested in learning more about visual arts at Free Columbia.
