Painting Self-Portraits With Real-World Results

On the morning of Feb. 13, architecture students at the Graduate School of Design could be found not drafting blueprints or discussing neoclassical façades, but rather painting black-and-white closeups of their own faces. Course VIS-02448, also known as “Landscape as Painting,” initially seems like an oddity in such a setting. Indeed, one might wonder where a course billing itself as the study of “emotional perception, bodily experience, and metaphoric interpretation of landscape” fits into the framework of an architect’s education. Yet GSD students and faculty explain that the technique, creativity, and vision the class demands apply equally well to architecture as to art.

Visiting artist Monique F. Crine was present to help lead a workshop for students to create a black-and-white self-portrait, the first major project of the semester-long course. The class is regularly taught by Professor Ewa J. Harabasz, an artist whose stunning depictions of social conflict and personal tragedy have brought her acclaim across three continents. Although her works are notable for their complexity, she says that her goals in teaching the class are quite simple. “The architect’s first task is to draw,” Harabasz says. “When I taught at Cornell University, I did art and architecture. The students from architecture could take classes from art, and it was mixed together…. But here it’s only architecture and design, and this is the first problem. The architects don’t have contact with art.” The rise of computers has deepened this divide; Harabasz explains that there are “completely different ways of thinking” involved in hand drawing and computer design.

She posits that these differences in thinking lead to differences in creativity––that once a student learns to express thoughts through drawing, regardless of talent, their mind becomes more artistic and productive. Part of this learning process includes inviting other artists, like Crine, to come and present to the class.

Crine, a photographer and painter based in Denver, creates intensely personal portraits based on photo references. “Monique has a specific technique for painting large-scale paintings with only black and white,” Harabasz says. “You can’t ignore this technique…. We have a black-and-white exercise right now, so I bring the best [artist].” After explaining her own work, Crine guided students through the process of transferring photographs of themselves onto a canvas, where they began to flesh out the images with subtly different blacks and grays.

Why this focus on black-and-white art? One reason is its simplicity, Crine explains; black and white allows students to focus on tone, value, dimensionality, and volume without worrying about the added complexity of color. Another reason is its reliance on an understanding of light and shadow within spaces, a skill surely useful to architecture students. Harabasz adds that there has been a trend towards muted colors in art recently: “Look at what artists are actually painting – they are all painting with less color. A lot of portraits, landscapes, even the news is black and white.” Harabasz sees this as a chance to give her students cutting-edge skills that they will be able to use right away.

Proficiency with black-and-white media is only one of the skills students are taking away from the workshop, however. “It gives you the opportunity to think about things on a more human scale, and that’s a valuable lesson,” says Miree Song, a third-year student in the Landscape Architecture master’s program. “Everything that we work with in the Landscape Architecture Department is very ephemeral…. What [Monique]’s doing is to take a still shot and paint it, which gives it more temporality, and I think that’s what we’re trying to achieve.” Other students identified the careful gridding and drafting involved in the image-transfer process as tasks which, although almost always delegated to a computer, are nonetheless important for architects to master.

But perhaps the most important lesson transmitted by the workshop is that of self-confidence. “[Monique] is young, communicative, an excellent person,” Harabasz says. “She’s definitely bringing so much energy and she can give [the students] that strength so that they can go and believe in themselves and what they do.”

If one thing is certain, it’s that Harabasz believes in her students’ work. “They are such smart students, and each of them can make unique, beautiful paintings. I wish for all the students in GSD that they have an excellent experience with my classes, that they enjoy it and not only enjoy it but also learn and use it in their own work.”