🗓 Dates: 8 classes from Jan 14th-Mar 4th
🕰️ Time: Tuesdays 6:30pm-9:30pm
🗺 Location: Fractal: 248 McKibbin St 1G, Brooklyn
💰 Tuition: $120
🧑🎓 Class size: 12 students
🧑🎨 Facilitator: Sebastian Hodge (feel free to contact me at sebastianhodge on Instagram, or by email at [email protected] if you have any questions!)
📋 Application form 👉 : https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf1LouUslOKaG_4StUVnAIKlhwQVVY9ZFv3c2Eil66tYx3e9Q/viewform?usp=sf_link
🏫 This course is offered through FractalU, click here to see all course listings!
Collaborative artwork is a fundamental mode of human creative expression, communication, and storytelling. From Paleolithic cave paintings, to Australian indigenous collaborative murals, to Surrealist Exquisite Corpses, human history is full of humans interweaving their creative energies to create artwork otherwise not possible. We live in interconnection with each other, and to create in interconnection mirrors this truth. The process and experience of making collaborative artwork together is a beautiful, sacred, connecting process; one which I am excited to share and explore with each of you.
In this course you will be immersed in the experience of creating collaborative artwork. We will primarily do so through the medium of drawing. This course welcomes everyone from occasional doodler to professional artist. The only prerequisite (there are no technical prerequisites) is that you at least mildly enjoy doodling, or at the very least have the desire to approach doing so. I am an experienced childhood educator, and all the activities we will do are low floor, high ceiling. There is no wrong answer, and each mistake is simply a new path revealing itself. If you enjoy drawing, and wish for it to become a more consistent habit/hobby/practice, this course can help you do that! If you want to meet and exchange ideas with more people/artists, this course will both actively facilitate that, and empower you with tools to go out and do that organically on your own.
Each session, I will introduce and facilitate a sequence of collaborative art activities, punctuated with creative warm-up routines and technical mini-lessons.
We will generally start with a brief check-in. This could look like writing down three adjectives to describe how you’re feeling, and then representing each with lines or shapes, and then sharing if you would like to. This is also a time to share a drawing you made that week if you would like to.
After that comes a creative warm-up activity. This could look like drawing lines to the flow and rhythm of music, or doing guided line work to prompts that encourage you to break out of routine patterns and try new things.
Then the bulk of each class will focus on engaging in collaborative drawing activities. Each session I will introduce at least one new game or activity, and will also interweave, reincorporate, and revisit previously introduced drawing activities (see syllabus below). For most of these activities, it is either all happening on one big paper per group of people, or each person is drawing and passing along. For example, with Exquisite Corpses, for 4 people, 4 Exquisite Corpses are created simultaneously; everyone is always drawing! And everyone walks home with one. Between drawings, there will be gallery walks, which involve walking around and looking at all the creations, and then briefly discussing and sharing observations and reflections. There will be a short quiet break midway (like quiet time or nap time in preschool), during which you will have the opportunity to sketch and write ideas in your notebook, or just lay and relax for a few moments.
Finally, we will always close with a brief check-out. This could look like sharing one thing you are looking forward to that week. Or reflecting on something you enjoyed that day.
I will encourage you to honor your mistakes as hidden intentions, to approach the collaborative process with openness and without attachment to the product, to engage each other with curiosity and respect, and to consider a drawing as a world, and yourself as a creative universe.
Some of the collaborative forms we will engage in have historical basis, drawing inspiration from ideas such as Exquisite Corpses from the Surrealists. Others are of my own creation (or co-creation with friends), synthesized from my experiences as an artist, teacher, and student.