The art history strand moves chronologically in four units and ends where modern art begins. Students start with the Italian Renaissance, opening in the late Gothic and following Vasari's Early, Middle, and High divisions through Masaccio, Brunelleschi, and Donatello, then Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, with a dedicated lesson on the four advances in realism. The second unit takes up Mannerism, the Baroque, and the Rococo, anchored by Caravaggio and Rubens with sessions on the Dutch Golden Age and French Rococo. The final two units treat the European art academies in halves: first the Poussin versus Rubens dispute and Neoclassicism, then Romanticism, Realism, the Salon des Refusés, and Bouguereau and Sargent, closing with the collapse of the academies and the rise of Impressionism. Delivery is lecture with image sets and a unit study guide, with a test at the end of each unit. The manual deliberately caps the history segment at twenty five or thirty minutes so that studio time is protected, which is why homework is minimal and Socratic discussion is limited.
The studio strand is oil painting on canvas panel, built as four projects that each add a technique. Students begin with a grisaille value scale, which doubles as their orientation to materials and procedure: mixing, color matching, application, and brush cleaning, assessed as a completed exercise alongside a painting materials test. They then paint a grisaille still life in black and white using opaque technique, worked from a photographic subject of their choosing, which is their first sustained project. Third comes a brunaille in brown tone on a toned eleven by fourteen panel, introducing transparent and indirect painting through dry brush and medium, with a study of the student's own hands as the classic subject and a photo area with props in the room so students shoot their own references. The culminating work is an alla prima painting using the full palette, wet into wet, with students proposing their own subjects for approval and color glazing taught near the end. Projects are graded on understanding of the concept and on effort and time management at roughly forty percent each, with skill in execution around twelve and creativity around seven, a weighting that rewards method and steady work over native talent. Run across two semesters, the natural break falls after the brunaille, which puts the academies units and the finished full color painting in the spring and lands them just before Fine Arts Night.
Pay: From $3,000.00 per year
Work Location: In person
