Beyond Likeness: The Painted Portrait

Undergraduate

This intermediate-level course offers an in-depth exploration of portrait painting that brings together material, perceptual, and conceptual inquiries. Through a series of focused modules, we examine portraiture not merely as likeness, but as a practice shaped by the physical conditions of paint, processes of mediation, and the social meanings projected onto faces and bodies. We ask: what constitutes a “portrait” today, how do we engage another person’s presence, and in what ways does painting itself structure this encounter? Students develop paintings through a variety of approaches to portraying the face, including live models, working from mirrors, self-generated images, and sources derived from visual culture at large. Slide lectures, readings, and written reflections provide conceptual frameworks that support and enrich studio practice. While in-class workshops build technical skills and visual strategies in oil painting, the course ultimately supports self-directed projects in which students develop their own methodologies. The goal is to use painting itself—through process, material choices, and sustained looking—to challenge assumptions about representation and reorient our experience of the human figure. Prerequisite: ART 1530 or permission of instructor. MW 4pm-5:55pm