Courageous Color – Challenging our assumptions

A workshop for the Newington Art League and guests will be given by Peggy Smolack, B.F.A. Hartford School of Art, B.S.A.E. Rhode Island School of Design, Fellowship Yale Norfolk summer art school. A former teacher in Hartford and Newington who currently curates art for the Newington Senior and Disabled Center, Peggy is also a member of the Newington Art League.

September 12, 2018

Newington Senior and Disabled Center

120 Cedar St

Newington, CT

6:30 pm

The art of painters Frederick Church, a renowned Hudson River School landscape painter and Sol Lewitt, a conceptual-minimalist artist collided in Peggy when she visited the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford this past July. Out of this collision she has explored the use of bold color and how it might have looked if Church had used it in his softly colored paintings.

The question arose, “Can we painters free ourselves from our subject matter enough to use color as our main subject even while having a recognizable subject matter?”

Josef Albers, who taught at Yale School of Art and built a whole school of art around color, said “In order to use color effectively, it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continuously.” 

More up to date than that is the Sherwin Williams paint advertisement that says “Color changes everything” and illustrates this will a full page ad.

You are invited to participate in this ongoing adventure on September 12 when Peggy speaks about color usage. Members and guests will be given the opportunity to paint using color as the main subject. We will use a pre-drawn picture to get us started. Please bring your own color supplies. Watercolor is preferred for its brilliance and transparency. Bring a color wheel to assist you in you experimentation.