Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Michelle Ross: Sei Solo, Final Performance!

Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 18th, we are thrilled to welcome back Michelle Ross to Eleventh Street Arts.  Ms. Ross will be preforming the final installment of J.S. Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin. We hope you will join us for this very special event. Ms. Ross's previous two performances could only be described as breathtaking. In the intimate setting of Eleventh Street Arts, Ms. Ross engages the audiences with this timeless and beautiful music surrounded by the paintings and sculpture of the Grand Central Atelier's artists.  This final concert and completion of the Bach series is certainly not to be missed. So, please, join us for a beautiful evening of music! 

"The point of art is...sharing beauty with each other." - Michelle Ross




End of Year Show & Festivities - Friday!


Join us this Friday, 6-9pm for our End of Year Celebration featuring work by graduating artists and a juried Salon Exhibition!

Peruse drawings, paintings and sculptures in a special exhibition of 2016 Graduates as well as a Juried Salon featuring select work from all of our students. The RESIDENTS show will also be on view at Eleventh Street Arts. 

Refreshments will be served!

The shows will continue to be on view during Open Studios this Saturday and Sunday from noon to 6pm. Special events include visiting with Resident Artists: Patrick Byrnes, Liz Beard, Sally Fama Cochrane and Devin Cecil-Wishing as they paint in their studio. Both days the Sculpture studio will demo portrait sculpture and on Sunday, summer workshop instructor Dale Zinkowski will demo Alla Prima Still Life Painting. 

These events provide the opportunity to learn more out about Summer Programs, our new Drawing Year and our upcoming yearlong Art and Architecture studies launching in September, 2017.

All events are part of LIC Arts Open 2016!


Monday, May 2, 2016

Artist Spotlight: Kathryn Engberg

Kathryn Engberg is a 4th year student in our full-time core program, just a few weeks away from graduating. She's been co-teaching our evening portrait class with Resident Artist Patrick Byrnes and will again teach in our Summer Drawing Boot Camp. This summer she'll instruct the one-week figure workshop as well as teach an evening portrait sketch class. Originally from Maryland, Katie is planning to to stay and continue to paint in NYC after graduation, teach at GCA and take her new kitten on walks throughout Central Park.

This portrait of Victoria was painted in March in the core program. Katie discusses her process below.

What keeps me coming back to portraits is the incredible amount of variety. Anatomically, everyone has a frontal bone, a zygomatic bone, a nasal bone, etc. but the skin that's on top is completely different. When I sit down to do a portrait, I really try to isolate what it is about that face, that I find intriguing or appealing to me personally. For example, with this portrait, I really wanted to represent her coloring with her natural red hair and pale skin. In particular, how her pale eyelashes were catching light in this downward gaze, was really interesting to me.



This drawing started in a very linear way as you can see from the bottom portion. The block-in process includes using tools such as measuring, shape finding and tilt matching to get the most accurate representation of life possible. After 4 hours/one day of working the linear aspect of the drawing, I began rendering with tone.



All of the hatch marks are going in the same direction, which is perpendicular to the direction of the light. This allows the overall fullness of the head to be the most important aspect rather than the small forms taking over (too many darks in the lights and too many lights in the darks.)

In a group class, we rotate who sets the pose with the model and the positions around the model are chosen by lottery. I was sitting on a horse, looking up at her, which exaggerates her downward gaze.



I transferred the drawing to linen using the oil transfer method. I then spent one session doing a grisaille underpainting in raw umber and flake white. as you can see, at the bottom of the painting. After the first day of grisaille underpainting, I then began to paint each section form by form in color. My palette for this painting included flake white, cadmium yellow light, yellow ochre, cadmium red, burnt sienna, raw umber and black.



After completing the final color pass, I then do a revision glazing pass where I can push color and improve the form. For the background, I wanted to keep it simple with one color, as opposed to an interior or studio setting. So I chose a fairly neutral color that is darker than the lights and lighter than the shadows and pushed slightly towards blue in order to make the reds of her hair, pop. I also used a palette knife for it which gave it more texture and interest, even though it's simple. It's hard to see this detail in the photograph.

This portrait will be on view during our End of Year Exhibition which highlights our graduates on Friday, May 20th from 6-9pm and is on view during our open studios Saturday and Sunday, May 21 & 22 from 12-6pm. Both of these events are also part of the annual LIC Arts Open that celebrates artists making work in Long Island City.

There are only a couple spots left in Katie's summer workshop in figure drawing that runs July 11-15. Her evening portrait sketch class will be held on Tuesday evenings 6-9pm for most of June, July and August. Registration is now open.

Katie will also have a solo show at The Union League Club in NYC for the month of November 2016. Opening reception details will be announced in the fall. View her website at kengberg.com and on instagram Kathryn_Engberg.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Artist Talk: Residents + Suggested Donation

Please join us this Wednesday, May 4th for an exciting evening with Suggested Donation and GCA's own resident artists!

Artists Edward Minoff and Tony Curanaj of acclaimed podcast Suggested Donation will host a special panel discussion with exhibiting artists from Eleventh Street Arts' current show, "RESIDENTS": Patrick Byrnes, Liz Beard, Devin Cecil-Wishing, Sally Fama Cochrane, Samuel Hung, Brendan Johnston and Justin Wood. Special appearance by Jay Braun. 

The panel will discuss the first formative "post-school" years of an artist's career, with an emphasis on working in a collaborative environment and creating a unique body of work. 



Suggested Donation Panel Discussion
Wednesday, May 4th
6-8 PM 
Eleventh Street Arts
free and open to the public
refreshments will be served